Nurturing parents are not liberal role models

[Originally published on a weblog called “What Is Liberalism?”]

UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff says:

The progressive worldview is modeled on a nurturant parent family. Briefly, it assumes that the world is basically good and can be made better and that one must work toward that. Children are born good; parents can make them better. Nurturing involves empathy, and the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible. On a larger scale, specific policies follow, such as governmental protection in form of a social safety net and government regulation, universal education (to ensure competence, fairness), civil liberties and equal treatment (fairness and freedom), accountability (derived from trust), public service (from responsibility), open government (from open communication), and the promotion of an economy that benefits all and functions to promote these values, which are traditional progressive values in American politics.

The problem with this world view is that liberalism then becomes an act of niceness. The metaphor has devastating real world consequences. A nurturing/liberal parent does something nice for the kids because the parent loves the kids. A nurturing/liberal parent allows the kids to do something risky or independent because the parent believes it is good for the kids development. The parent loves and guides the child. This kind of thinking emphasizes kindness and compassion, but otherwise it has similarities to forms of authoritarian thinking. As a world view or political metaphor, this is government justifed by niceness. The implications are appalling. People with this world view can easily end up craving to be ruled by a good, kind-hearted prince when they should be craving actual liberty of action. President Bush ends up hated because he is so obviously a bad prince (it doesn’t matter if your metric comes from Walt Disney or Machiavelli, Bush is clearly a bad prince). President Clinton ends up getting more of a pass than he should be allowed because he seems nice.

When your world view looks at government as if government should be a nuturing parent, then liberalism is no longer a necessity, it is merely an act of kindness, a gift of freedom granted by a loving parent, like the parent who trusts their kid enough at age 16 to give them the car keys. The rights of citizens no longer flow from some absolute source (social utility, or “their Creator”, or one’s ancestor’s choice to trade the State of Nature for the State of Law, etc.) but instead flow from the kindness of the government. The rights that liberalism grant each citizen are no longer the only method ever discovered for a society to stay prosperous over the long term, they are instead the compassionate indulgence an affluent parent can afford to grant their spoiled children because society has gotten past the point where people have to really struggle. More to the point, liberalism suddenly becomes a thing a society does once it is affluent, not what a society does to escape poverty.

The nurturing parent slides rather easily into the smothering parent, and those who justify their progressive politics with the nuturing parent world view also let their politics slide easily into the mode of smothering parent. This is especially true for those who value empathy and “the responsibility to take care of oneself and others for whom we are responsible“.

Consider how this world view shapes one’s policy ideas around an issue like the environment. A nurturing parent loves their child and wants to see an independent child, but when the child’s environment is a wreck and/or dangerous the parent will put limits on the child’s freedom of movement to keep the child safe. This is an all together reasonable thing for a parent to do to a child, but it is not a reasonable thing for a government to do to a citizen. A nurturing parent also hopes to teach their child how to be good, and looks for educational opportunities by which the child might be taught the values and ideals of the parent. Again, this is a reasonable thing for a parent to hope to do with their child. But applied to politics, it often leads to policy prescriptions that emphasize the moralistic over the utilitarian. Personal, small-scale, symbolic, morally correct acts are given far greater importance than stopping the corporations who are responsible for the overwhelming majority of environmental damage. Thus the nuturing parent metaphor is a weak one for justifying a progressive politics, if by “progressive politics” one means a politics that empowers individuals or maximizes social utility.

It seems likely, to me, that over the next 100 years the environment will undergo stresses unlike any it has suffered during any part of human history so far, yet I also think classical liberalism holds all the tools we need to survive through such a period: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, freedom of trade, the right to due process. My thinking on this matter will seem common place and even stereotypical to someone who knows the history of the liberal political tradition, but will make little sense to someone whose progressive politics are coming wholly from a place of kindness.

The nuturing parent world view is also harmful to the extent that it turns all citizens into spoiled children. The nuturing parent knows themselves to be less than perfect as parents, and accepts they probably made mistakes in the upbringing of their children, mistakes for which they feel a deep regret. The nuturing parent tolerates the adolescent rebellions of their children with as much loving respect as possible, and also, often times, feels a crushing guilt when the accusations hurled against them have the ring of truth. And the children brought up in this world view know full well the hurt that their accusations can cause, and when angry they seek and discover various ways to turn the knife. Thus the nuturing parent is vulnerable to a certain amount of manipulation and abuse that it takes great wisdom to navigate and withstand. For this reason, the nurturing parent world view can lead to the absolute betrayal of liberalism in the field of foreign policy. Nations that pursue starkly anti-liberal policies can harp upon the injustices that they themselves have suffered, and thus appeal to the guilt of those who would otherwise censure them.

Anyone who cares about freedom should take a good look at the nurturing parent metaphor and then fight to exile it from progressive political movements. Because it is a pathetic world view on which to justify freedom. It does not matter if you see the government as a nuturing parent or if you see the government as a strict parent. If you see the government as any kind of parent at all, then you are an enemy of freedom.

No metaphor can perfectly capture a living political ideal. No metaphor is perfect. But some are better than others. If you support a politics whose aim is to expand personal freedom or maximize social utility, then you should consider adopting for yourself the metaphor of a negotiated contract as the metaphor by which you tend to view the relations of citizens to each other and to the state. Imagine every citizen as having negotiated and entered into an agreement with all the other citizens of your country. Each citizen has agreed to lay down whatever arms they may have held while living in a wild state of nature, and granted to the state an absolute monopoly of physical violence, so long as certain reserved rights are always respected. Each citizen has agreed to be bound by the laws that the mutually negotiated political process will proceed to produce. Each citizen has agreed that all citizens must be served fairly and equally, with no privileges reserved for a special few. This agreement is the social contract. The metaphor of the social contract is time tested, and it is the one that the European Enlightenment and liberal political theory were built upon. It is not a perfect metaphor. A primatologist might complain that all primates live in societies, and therefore there was never a time when humans lived in a true state of nature. That’s a fair factual complaint, but it’s not relevant to the metaphorical use of the social contract. The negotiated contract is a strong metaphor for a politics of freedom. All non-liberal ideologies suggest in some way that people live to serve the state, only liberalism suggests that the state exists to serve the people. And this idea, that the state exists to serve the people, flows naturally from a metaphor that starts by assuming free people negotiating to be mutually ruled, but only for mutual benefit.