Infantilism and Anti-Paternalism

John Milbank and Adrian Pabst (Politics of Virtue, 17) claim that “politics should revert to its ancient character as a ‘politics of the soul,’ 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.”

They anticipate the liberal objection: It’s “wholly unacceptable to treat citizens as children and for government to assume any kind of parental cast.” Liberal order is politics for grown-ups. Milbank and Pabst are having none of it: “this trite liberal truism about government for and by autonomous adults is . . . the ultimate liberal delusion.”

That’s for two reasons. First, by treating human beings as bodies without souls, liberalism is involved in “the most patronising mode of parenting,” parenting that manages and manipulates its charges. Liberalism refuses “Socratic persuasion” in favor of “assent to prevailing mass opinion, propaganda, and fashion.” Theres’ no alternative, since to persuade would be to acknowledge that the persuadable are more than bodies.

Second, and more convincingly, Milbank and Pabst point out that “adulthood is never achieved all at once” and is rarely if ever fully achieved. When “it 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.” Since they consider themselves all-growed-up, they don’t feel any need to grow—even 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 “infantile options go unrebuked.”

In short, “the 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” (18).