Put away childish ways

Parenting brings new challenges as time passes. My oldest (or older ones!) is increasingly bright and knowledgeable. He has a good memory and is beginning to have sound basic reasoning skills. One result of this is that he is able to recognize when the younger ones have said something nonsensical and he is apt to pounce on it when this happens. (My favourite, he once replied to something his brother said with, “That is not grammatical. I will not answer.”) Which is good in a way (he’s exercising his capacity to be rational), but not insofar as it’s unkind. So now part of what I have to help him to learn is that they are young (in particular, younger than him), they haven’t had a chance to acquire the same basic reasoning skills yet, and so it’s silly and mean to expect them to think and understand and reason at his level. It’s okay to gently correct them, but they will only ever learn through the benefit of time and patience and loving encouragement from those who are already further along in their intellectual and moral development. You can’t simply point out their errors to them, because they simply are not old enough to have intellectually developed enough to be able to understand and benefit from that kind of correction.

To some extent I often find myself in an analogous situation to that of my oldest son when I am faced with arguments from adults. But the difference, of course, is that these people aren’t little children who are simply too young to have achieved a mature level of intellectual and moral development, they’re ‘full-grown,’ ‘adults,’ who to look at physically you might expect to be mature intellectually also. But in fact they’re pretty clearly not. Their moral understanding and reasoning skills are often an embarrassingly bad combination of ignorance, arrogance, complacency, irrationality, and lack of self-awareness. (Any of these may not be so bad on its own, but when you put them together...?) So what to do? Should I just tell myself something like I tell my son when dealing with his younger siblings? Should I tell myself to treat such people like they’re three-year-olds or seven-year-olds, tell myself it would be silly and mean to try to interact with them as if they were mature adults in their right minds, who have a reasonable basic grasp of differences between true and false, rational and irrational, good and bad, right and wrong, and a grasp of the basic rules and procedures for making those distinctions in practice? Little children, especially if they’re tired, are prone to bursting into tears if they can’t right this second have that random doodad they happen to see their brother playing with. Should this be our default setting for dealing with adults who are attempting to discuss adult topics: speak as if you are speaking to a little child at nap time, who might well be on the verge of a tantrum, or who is simply incapable of sitting still for one minute to ponder and think something through?

But the problem with such an approach is obvious: you can’t speak with little children about adult topics, so when you’re speaking to someone about an adult topic, you can’t address them as you would little children. Insofar as it’s an adult topic, you have to discuss it in an adult way. And anyway, it’s not (as a rule) silly or mean to do so, because there comes a point in a (normal) child’s development (that is, as soon as it is possible!) when you have to become firmer and when tantrums – behaving as if the only thing in the world that should matter to anyone is pandering to my present passions – can and should be treated firmly as being no longer acceptable. Older children and certainly adults deserve and need to be treated as if they are past that point. Otherwise they won’t feel any need to act as if they are past that point, and instead they will forever remain more or less stunted in their intellectual and moral development. 

(Because we live in a ‘dictatorship of relativism’ – a culture wherein non-relativistic views are often derisively dismissed or angrily shouted down – people are generally very complacent and self-satisfied and inclined to be shocked and offended by the very notion of ‘stunted intellectual and moral development’ – as if there exists any real standard, beyond some vague, implicit appeal to currently fashionable conventions, by which to judge our intellectual and moral state as stunted or not! But this is, of course, just a symptom/evidence of that very arrested intellectual and moral development that I’m talking about, and which is precisely characteristic of a ‘dictatorship of relativism.’)

So adults are not little children and we should not attempt to nurture and indulge adults in the way we would a little child. It’s hardly even possible to do so – you can’t order them to have a timeout – but since adults are not little children, it would be wrong anyway to treat them as such. (Adults who abuse positions of power (e.g., in academia, in making policy/law, in media, in preaching, in politicking, in law enforcement, etc.) by treating other adults like children are pretty despicable people.) We have a responsibility, as adults, to respect others, including strangers, including those whose views we find strange, and to try honestly to understand the views of others when commenting on them. In spite of the childish bursts of outrage and self-righteousness with which we might sometimes be overcome , we remain under the obligation to think and behave in a mature way. If all we are is tolerant of childish behaviour, that's not kindness. If we are afraid ever to enter into debate or risk offering a reproof to someone for his self-righteous tantrum, or even for a very sweet and kind person's willful ignorance, that's not kindness. It's spineless. It's negligence. 

That said, if a man remains like an infant needing milk, go ahead and give him some milk; but also try to impress on him that he should be moving on to solid food (see Hebrews 5). “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I reasoned as a child; when I became a man I put away childish ways.” (1Cor 13:11)* Awake sleeper! Put away childish ways!

*(Note, St Paul’s remark here comes right in the middle of his encomium to – surprise? – love. People love to talk about love, but they seem seldom to consider that love requires (of ourselves and of others) learning to speak, to understand, to reason in a mature way. Love is not a pure formless reaching out of the will but calls for discipline and training of the intellect so as to know the truth so that love may be indeed true love and not a mere blind passion.)