We get a lot of university alumni magazines at our house. They’re big and glossy and have a little news about your alma mater. They’re full of self-congratulatory pap about how dedicated to social justice your school is. And they include a handy envelope so you can help advance that social justice by sending a generous donation to wealthy government employees who will then redistribute that money to the most socially just and environmentally friendly degree programs they can think of. Well, right after they pay for the printing and mailing costs of big, tree-consuming, glossy alumni magazines.
(Higher education is critical to our society, of course, and if the money is used correctly it could be a great cause. But I’m just not filled with confidence about their ability to use that money in the best possible way when they spend a lot of time telling me how dancing can create world peace and justice and not so much explaining exactly how they helped grow the local economy, created private sector jobs, or ensured their degree programs are actually worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans and additional hundreds of thousands in taxpayer-funded subsides paid for the experience.)
Usually these magazines are worth reading, just for their silly, knee-jerk, completely-lacking-in-self-awareness, college-know-it-all-hippy, pie-in-the-sky, unintentionally humorous liberalism. But every once in awhile something catches my eye that actually scares me.
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This month’s University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts’ version, called “Reach,” had a series of articles on “Imagining Peace.” One of them focused on Joan Tronto, a Political Science prof who focuses on “care”.
Tronto has spent much of her career writing about care—and she’s nowhere near finished. In her view, care isn’t a sentimental concept. It’s a political one. Neither does she see it as an optional or peripheral human enterprise. It’s a mainstay of existence, a requirement of the unspoken pact that enables societies to thrive.
“A political [concept].” That means a government concept. It means we need to be forced against our will to care about each other to the arbitrary specifications of some government official. Professor Tronto opines:
“Politics has always involved activities beyond the realm of care, of the household, of the family. All that is considered beneath politics, really. And in this society, care comes after almost everything else. It’s a result of our preoccupation with economic life: we measure too much only in money.”
All of this could change, she says. In the end, all that’s necessary is sufficient public resolve and an emphatic public voice.
I don’t WANT politics involved in my household or my family. I want politicians to leave me and my family alone. I’ll pay my taxes so I have roads and police and firefighters and schools. I don’t need to pay someone to tell me how much time to spend with my little girl, or who to hire to watch her when I’m working.
I don’t see my family or personal choices in how I choose to care about or for them as “beneath” politics, I see all that as above politics. It’s telling that Professor Tronto thinks that in all things, no matter how intimate and personal, that politics and political solutions should come first.
What’s really upsetting is that the author of the piece (along with every editor and department chair who approved the magazine before it went out) just accepted all of this uncritically, without thinking about, asking about, or commenting on the broader implications of an unlimited “political” solution to us not properly caring about our families or communities. If the government can tell us exactly how to care for our families, our friends, our children, etc., what can’t the government regulate? And just what politician is so wise as to presume to tell me (at the point of a gun) how I’m supposed to love and care for my wife and daughter?
As an alumni not just of the U of MN, but of the department in which Ms. Tronto teaches (our paths never crossed, she’s only been there since 2009), let’s just say this particular article had exactly the opposite of its intended effect.
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And by the way, what do the taxpayers of Minnesota pay this woman? I searched through the PoliSci course catalog, but can’t find anything she actually teaches. So not only are her academic theories the worst kind of anti-freedom, poorly thought out drivel, but she apparently can’t actually be bothered with , you know, educating actual students. When people like this are on staff, I don’t want to hear another single solitary word about how our education budgets are “cut to the bone.”
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It’s obviously good to care for one another, within our own circles of friends and our families, and for our communities as a whole. But the cost of forcing us to “care” via any kind of “political solution” is unthinkable.
And while I don’t foresee “sufficient public resolve and an emphatic public voice” for mandated family care and parental playtime schedules from the US Department of Giving a Crap About Each Other, we see little versions of this happening in our governments every day, whether its helmet laws or yet another cigarette warning sign mandate on local businesses or a forcing us to buy health insurance that has certain coverage mandates whether we want those coverage “options” or even the coverage at all.
At the end of the day, many hundreds of these tiny little exercises in “political solutions to caring” get us to the same place as Ms. Tronto’s absurd political theories do – out of compassion and care, we trade away more and more of our freedoms until we’re all subject to the whims of the nanny bureaucrats appointed to look out for our own goods with the assumption that they know better than we do what is in our interests.
Ms. Tronto believes that we undervalue “care”, and maybe we do. But what is the value of liberty? Should we give up freedom so a government official can claim to have made me happy by managing my family’s affairs in a “more caring” way? And why does every solution to every last perceived social ill have to involve the use of force?
Would Ms. Tronto be OK with George W. Bush in charge of how she cares about her family, and how “adequate care” was statutorily defined and enforced? I sure wouldn’t, and I voted for the man twice!
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Not everything that is bad needs to be outlawed. Not everything that is good needs to be mandated. We (theoretically) place hard limits and ceilings on what government can do for a reason – because it’s far, far too easy for a government official with all the best of intentions to literally smother our liberties with their love and care.
And in the end, does any tyranny stay benevolent for long?
