Children contradict all the major assumptions of liberalism, and so liberalism works hard to contradict all the major facts about children. In fact, when our history is written, by whatever academic is given the penance of writing it, our states will be described as societies that worked very hard to pretend that there are no children at all — just adults, smaller adults, and adults trapped inside wombs.
Liberalism rallies around a notion of freedom which, plainly, does not apply to kids. Here, freedom is that essentially negative quality of not-being-coerced-by-others; to have no masters; to owe obedience to no man. Such freedom may seem desirable if we imagine the world freakishly composed of healthy adults. But a child who is “free,” in this liberal sense, is an orphan. A two-year-old with no masters is abandoned. Children, waddling about, signify an alternative kind of freedom — no cold stare into an abyss awaiting one’s radical choice, but the freedom of belonging.
Children are obviously free in and through belonging to their community. This entails obedience to that community’s authorities; obligation to the weaker and younger; being given-over to those aiding them into virtue; and a whole host of positive, political relationships that ground and give substance to whatever negative freedom results from this belonging.
Old-timers know it best, however nostalgic their lament: a child governed by an entire community is freer than a child whose parents enter into the liberal model and assert the radical freedom of their child with words like, “You can’t tell my child what to do.” The former freedom is the romance of the well-ordered neighborhood; roaming until dinner; hot water from a hose; mothers who trust each other’s common participation and stake in the good of every child on the street and so allow, quite peacefully, law and custom to be enforced at the Smith house as much as the Jones. The latter freedom is liberal freedom, the child awkwardly conceived of as an individual with a battery of rights that cannot be transgressed through communal governance; the freedom of the lawsuit; the freedom that takes down the trampoline and the playground equipment worth climbing; the endless suburban bickering.
It’s an awkward fit, because children are bigger, clumsier, and boast stranger appendages than “individuals with rights.” On the one hand, liberalism conceives of the child as an individual whose highest freedom is to be free from coercion. On the other, because of the inconvenient habit children have of walking in front of eighteen-wheelers and stabbing their sisters with lit sparklers, liberalism grants a space in which parents are simply allowed to coerce, punish, banish, steal-from, and demand unpaid labor from children.
Liberalism allows, for a time, illiberalism. The family becomes a medieval museum-piece, preserved for lack of a better plan. But if our homes are no more than incubators for hatching individuals with rights; if the Thing To Have is negative freedom and the child a being who can’t have it yet; then what we call “family” is temporary slavery, and children are slaves until they can handle being free.
What sets us free from the slavery of childhood is, presumably, the moral, intellectual, spiritual, and physical capacity to exercise our freedom rationally. But since the liberal State does not know or care when a child has such capacities, this amounts to an arbitrary date: at the age of eighteen, the child can no longer be coerced by its parents. If childhood is the ability to be punished by one’s parents for one’s misdeeds, adulthood is characterized by the ability to punish one’s parents for their misdeeds. The eighteenth birthday is marked, not by a recognition of a certain attainment of virtue and maturity, but by an arbitrarily granted capacity to utilize the violence of the State to protect one’s negative, individual freedom over and against one’s parents.
The ability to say “you’re not my dad” is the freedom liberalism sows; the loneliness of the adult, shouting his atomized, fatherless independence during whatever break his service-industry gig allows, is its fruit. Thank goodness we are not so cruel to children as to the adults children become.
Likewise, the liberal notion of private property simply does not apply to children. Does the child have an absolute legal claim to a piece of property? Obviously not. I can take my son’s Nintendo from him, no matter if he purchased it with money he made mowing grass. But, surely, I can do this unjustly. Surely, I can “take candy from a baby” and be liable for judgment.
Just as an older view of freedom governs the movements of children along the street, so an older view of property governs the belongings of children. It is not legal ownership, backed up by the power of the State, but use-ownership that serves as the proper theoretical framework to deal with jars of marbles, decks of Pokemon cards, and presents under the tree. Children have no absolute right to their belongings. Their private ownership is justified by their righteous use of their property for the common good. Their parents, who have the busy task of aiding children in orienting their weird, selfish desires towards the good and away from evil, naturally and justly bestow, ban, confiscate, destroy, give away, and return property on precisely this basis, saying things like: “Since you two apes can’t learn to share, no one gets the PEZ dispenser,” or “You can have the cricket bat when you stop hitting your cousin in the knees with it,” or “I don’t like you playing Goldeneye alone. You can only bring it out when friends are over.”
The family is an odd space in which the traditional doctrine of property remains in practice, thanks to the incompetence of the State, which could only enforce the contracts of children against their parents at the risk of revolution. Within this Catholic view, all ownership is justified only as means by which what is owned is orientated towards the good of all. Once the State magics the child into an eighteen-year-old individual, a new rule for property applies: The same child who could not use the art kit unless he refrained from drawing on the walls becomes an adult who can turn his property into a strip club; who can erect billboards beaming whatever commercial messages he pleases into the common view; who can buy up land and leave it to rot. At eight years old one can be coerced into cleaning one’s room; at eighteen, one can be a slum lord. At ten, one can be asked to share; at twenty one is advised not to share, as it may decrease entrepreneurship. At twelve, hoarding is a sin; at thirty it is an investment.
Liberalism is wrong. Children are not failed adults. Adults are children of God. Catholic descriptions of freedom, rights, and property are fundamentally more realistic than their liberal re-descriptions, precisely insofar as they apply to children and adults. Liberalism re-interprets the family as a period of slavery, in which medieval doctrines apply, and then arbitrarily declares children released from bondage, citizens of the New World, in which new morals apply and new rules govern. The only possible argument for a fundamental shift in the political order from the child-embedded-in-family to the individual-under-the-State is this: that the child is weirdly made capable of liberal freedom by a training in Catholic freedom; that slavery produces the physical and psychical development by which one is able to be free.
In a sense, this simply must be the case. Liberalism is a rejection of the political order of the Catholic Church. It is reactionary. It has no positive doctrine, beyond “thou shalt have no positive doctrine.” It needs the teachings of the Church, in some form, in order to have a living enemy from which it can suck blood, granting substance to shadow. This is the role of the family in the liberal state—to be a living embodiment of the social teaching of the Catholic Church, maintained as microcosmic Old Order to be transcended by newly-minted individuals into the New.
Freedom, under liberalism, simply means not having a mother or a father. Property, under liberalism, means the capacity to extract things from their common state, enveloping them in the privacy of the self, regardless of whether one’s actions serve the common good, that is, to subtract any common, familial meaning inherent to property. Religious belief, under liberalism, means belief that does not come in, through, and with an actual community, but belief to which one privately consents as an individual, over and against the communal, baptismal logic of the Catholic Church. Liberalism needs the unique, positive law of the family in order to give meaning and substance to the gifts it gives those who leave the family. The tension between the traditional family and the individual’s departure from it into the big, wide world is not accidentally the subject of all of our movies — the family is the necessary idiot which makes liberalism look smart; the oppressor which makes liberalism liberating; the slavery which makes contemporary wage-slavery feel like freedom. This is why liberal states, even as they are gradually transfigured into massive, society-wide orphanages for childless adults, will always remain “pro-family.”
The anthropology of the Catholic Church is the extension of the loving logic of the family to all orders of society: we are all children. We are all sons and daughters. We are all free in and through being members of one body. The maturity of adulthood is real, and it is good, but it is not a stark, sudden entrance into an anti-familial police state. Adulthood is the perfection of our capacities in virtue and so of our capacity for serving the common good — not freedom from having to. “Eighteen” is not a magical number. “Eighteen” is a sign and symbol of the over-bloated power of the modern liberal state to extrinsically, juridically declare the logic of the family, and its order of peace, subservient to the logic of the state and its order of violence. In the coming postliberal society, its significance will be eclipsed by ceremonies celebrating an actual attainment of virtue and membership within one’s community, and the memory of that dismal birthday party, in which the child is invited out of the family and into the world of violence will dissolve like a nightmare in the morning sun.