Kindergarten was a lot of fun, but I’m glad it’s over. Some people liked it so well they wish they’d never left. A few give every indication that they wish they could go back. I think a great many really need to.
In 1988, a Unitarian minister named Robert Fulghum published a bestselling book entitled All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I’ve only read excerpts from it, so I can’t be sure of the author’s intention. From the parts I’ve seen, my guess is that he agreed with me.
I used to think that growing up was, you know, some sort of goal; it was the state of being that was ultimately desired by most human beings. The only alternative I could envision, as a child, was dying before I got old enough to be an adult. That didn’t seem like a very attractive option.
But our government, in its infinite benevolence, offers us another one.
The dominating State doesn’t want us to be adults, because adults are independent and think for themselves. It wants us to remain forever little children. It doesn’t even mind that we might be oversized brats, because then it has a ready excuse to use whatever force may be necessary to control us. Because of this, it directs much of its efforts toward treating us like children. And when we’re persistently treated in this way, most of us are going to behave like children.
That, of course, gives the State an excuse to go on treating us like kids, and on and on it goes. None of us wants to think that we are anything less than adults. But we see all those other people out there carrying on like toddlers, so we easily become convinced that for the sake of us grownups, the government must be stern and parental with them, just to keep them in line.
The dominating State doesn’t want us to be adults, because adults are independent and think for themselves. It wants us to remain forever little children.
Libertarians annoy people, because we tend to remind them of the things they learned in kindergarten and then, evidently, forgot. Most people think they remember everything they learned in kindergarten. It’s all those other fools who need to be reminded. When libertarians remind them of the basics, they’re insulted. But they really ought to humor us. All those other poor fools need every reminder they can get.
Among the admonitions issued by the Rev. Fulghum, we must share everything, play fair, not hit people, clean up our own messes, and never take things that aren’t ours. There are more rules — 16 in all — but those are the ones that absolutely must be remembered if we are to have a harmonious society. If we don’t always flush, wash our hands before eating, consume warm cookies and cold milk, or take a nap every afternoon, we might be a little tired and somewhat unhygienic, but most people will never know. And putting things back where we found them, saying we’re sorry when we’ve hurt people, watching out for traffic, and holding hands and sticking together pretty much go along with the most important suggestions. The others — living balanced lives, being aware of wonder, remembering that we will all die, and just looking — we either figure out over the course of our years on this planet or suffer the consequences ourselves.
But libertarianism is an even simpler philosophy. It boils everything down to basic logical and moral principle. It can be gunked-up and expanded into all sorts of things, many of them complicated and some even crazy. Those who, for whatever reason, dislike the notion that others might enjoy the same degree of freedom they want for themselves seem to have an extra bone in their heads that blocks them from understanding libertarian ideas.
It especially irks “progressives” — civilized, evolved, peaceful, and nonviolent as they want to think they are — to be told that when they resort to government action against people they dislike, they are using violence. It isn’t being administered directly, because they aren’t going out and shooting them or personally threatening them with guns, so they don’t want to see the connection. When libertarians patiently explain that the State has guns, bombs, tanks, police dogs, and now drones, means of force that it uses with ever-increasing frequency even on its own citizens, they pretend that’s just a technicality. No doubt they even want to believe it.
They have fallen so totally in love with government intervention in every dispute that they are actually all about aggression. Instead of progressives, they could more accurately be called aggressives.
When I debate this with aggressives on political blogs, the argument always runs something like this: “They [whoever they are, though almost always conservatives] are bad people. So we must hit them.” It’s never articulated this plainly, but of course that always comes down to being what they’re saying.
That’s the reasoning of a 5-year-old — a 5-year-old who has either yet to enter kindergarten or flunked it. And when this is pointed out to them, however gently, they almost invariably resort to calling people names and using profanity. They may think this makes them look more grown up, but it makes them look like seriously delinquent 5-year-olds. In an era when their favorite means of settling disputes was more readily employed, they’d have been hauled out behind the woodshed and paddled.
“But-but-but,” goes the standard whine, “they do it, too!” Johnny’s mommy lets him, so why can’t I?
As for conservatives, they are frankly authoritarians. They groove on violence. They can’t understand why 5-year-olds aren’t still being hauled out behind the woodshed and paddled. Johnny’s mommy probably takes him to the playground with an Uzi on her shoulder. This is the attitude they want to emulate?
How can we withdraw from imperialistic military adventures in other countries if we see violence as the solution to absolutely every problem?
How much aggression can a progressive society tolerate? That is not a trivial question. If everybody in a society behaves like a kindergartener, is real progress possible? Can such a society even function on a basically civilized level?
Libertarians may be annoying, but they’re raising a concern it behooves any serious progressive to consider. How, for example, can we withdraw from imperialistic military adventures in other countries if we see violence as the solution to absolutely every problem? If all we have is a hammer, as the saying goes, will everything in the world, at home as well as abroad, not look like a nail? How we behave at home, toward one another, does in large part determine how we behave abroad.
And if we can muster no greater fellow-feeling for other people in our own country, how on earth are we to deal with those in faraway lands with genuine compassion? There’s also a lot to the saying that charity begins at home.
I may be horribly misguided, but I’ve always been under the impression that progressives wanted to be “the adults in the room,” as they often say. That they believed human beings needed to continue evolving from a more primitive and childish state to a higher consciousness. That they wanted to keep the torch of the Enlightenment lit and moving forward through the generations. Yet increasingly they carry on like the studio audience of Captain Kangaroo.
Their response to nearly every situation is, indeed, to use government force. Not as a last resort — as may occasionally be necessary, out of self-defense, when their adversaries insist on using force against them — but as the very first and only resort. Without even trying to, as one of their heroes, John Lennon, so famously sang, “Give Peace a Chance.”
Another holy word in the progressive vocabulary — ranking right up there alongside peace — is democracy. In which they claim to fervently believe, and for the sake of which they can apparently justify almost anything they do. But without the sort of mutual respect, willingness to listen, to share everything, play fair and not hit people we were supposed to have learned in kindergarten, democracy is impossible. As are peace, equality, justice, and everything else that self-professed progressives say they favor.
Our school years, even the later ones, often seem to have been meaningless. “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,” sang Simon and Garfunkel, “it’s a wonder I can think at all.” But some of that stuff was, indeed, meaningful — and what we learned in kindergarten actually may have been some of the most important stuff of all. They gave it to us early not because it was OK if we forgot it, but because it would be most fundamental to our lives from that time on.
Do we know enough to read the writing on the wall? Will we awaken to the realization that only in a society where everyone’s rights and freedoms are respected can anyone’s be safe? If not, that moving finger’s message on the wall will spell not progress, but doom.
Any society that has degenerated into a gigantic, unruly kindergarten will eventually find itself deprived of freedom. The jackboots will step in to restore order. For the big-moneyed backers of big government — those who actually benefit from it, those whom it ensconces in power — this is undoubtedly the plan. I wonder when “progressives” are going to wake up and see that.
I know it will happen eventually. They’ll figure it out sooner or later. I only hope that later doesn’t turn into too late.
