It continues to intrigue me — the biblical point Obama raised in his inauguration speech on putting away childish things.
He seems to mean things like partisanship and political gamesmanship and their attendant ills, with self-righteousness and ideological rigor mortis being two of the biggest.
But those things are decidedly not childish. They are the sole province of adults (and adolescents, I might add). Name me a child who sticks to a course of action, no matter how foolish, based on some abstract philosophical notion.
Children may fixate on something and carry on like fools, but it’s generally over a concrete object, say a chocolate chip cookie, a Matchbox car or a pair of footie pajamas. I don’t see them crying over failed adherence to free-market principles or skepticism over Keynesian economics.
I guess it sounds clever to compare peculiarly adult blind spots to childish things. But it doesn’t do much to advance our political discourse when we seek to infantilize people based on what they may feel are important principles.
Or when we seek to explain away what is decidedly an adult problem as some sort of childishness that needs to be abandoned. Good luck with that.
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January 27, 2009 at 4:58 pm
jonolan
Oh! I thought he meant capitalism since Marx described it essentially as such when discussing the evolution or growth of political-economic systems…LOL
January 27, 2009 at 5:02 pm
joelb28
First lesson of politics or academia or any other place where people debate each other: if you don’t like something, call it childish. That oughta shame the other side into giving it up.
If that doesn’t work, ask them to define their terms or something, anything, it doesn’t matter. While they cast about for a definition, you can think of a comeback.
January 27, 2009 at 6:50 pm
jonolan
Let me modify that a bit, “First lesson of politics or academia or any other place where people debate each other: if you don’t like something, marginalize the person saying it, by calling them childish, obstructive, divisive, racist, traitor … anything that makes them something that the masses won’t want to be associated with.”