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{"id":18422,"date":"2016-10-07T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-07T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=173"},"modified":"2016-10-07T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T00:00:00","slug":"infantilism-and-anti-paternalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/10\/infantilism-and-anti-paternalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Infantilism and Anti-Paternalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

J<\/span>ohn Milbank and Adrian Pabst (Politics of Virtue<\/em><\/a>, 17) claim that \u201cpolitics should revert to its ancient character as a \u2018politics of the soul,\u2019 concerned above all to nurture virtuous citizens, just as parents are concerned above all with the character of their children, precisely because they are also primarily concerned with their happiness.\u201d <\/p>\n

They anticipate the liberal objection: It\u2019s \u201cwholly unacceptable to treat citizens as children and for government to assume any kind of parental cast.\u201d Liberal order is politics for grown-ups. Milbank and Pabst are having none of it: \u201cthis trite liberal truism about government for and by autonomous adults is . . . the ultimate liberal delusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s for two reasons. First, by treating human beings as bodies without souls, liberalism is involved in \u201cthe most patronising mode of parenting,\u201d parenting that manages and manipulates its charges. Liberalism refuses \u201cSocratic persuasion\u201d in favor of \u201cassent to prevailing mass opinion, propaganda, and fashion.\u201d Theres\u2019 no alternative, since to persuade would be to acknowledge that the persuadable are more than bodies.<\/em><\/p>\n

Second, and more convincingly, Milbank and Pabst point out that \u201cadulthood is never achieved all at once\u201d and is rarely if ever fully achieved. When \u201cit is officially supposed that adulthood is a matter of absolute metaphysical status and not of degree, then, ironically, all citizens are trapped within the worst sort of perpetual, self-congratulatory infancy.\u201d Since they consider themselves all-growed-up, they don\u2019t feel any need to grow\u2014even though recognition of the need to keep growing is one of the main marks of mature adulthood. No choices are ruled out of bounds; even the most \u201cinfantile options go unrebuked.\u201d <\/p>\n

In short, \u201cthe characteristic liberal ignoring of the primacy of time, tradition, habit and formation, together with the gradualness and unfinished character of human growth, ensures that its formal claim to treat all equally as autonomous adults, bearers of natural rights, reverts inevitably to a real infantilization of most\u201d (18). <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"