Saturday, January 30, 2010 :::
I'm not sure why I made it so far into this piece on the infantilization of young adults in Western societies without realizing it was Mark Steyn. Anyway, as usual, I get caught up on the minor tangents:Renato Brunetta, the Minister of Public Administration and Innovation, announced his support for a law requiring children to skedaddle out of their parents’ pad when they turned 18. That would certainly be an Innovation but might well put strains on Public Administration: right now, seven out of 10 adults aged 18-39 live with their folks. Indeed, Signor Brunetta blushed to admit that he himself had lived at home until he was 30. “My mother made my bed up until I left and I am ashamed of that,” he confessed. I would hope he's talking about ensuring to parents the right to kick out their kids, rather than requiring them to do so; anyway, it's that last point, where he runs into the potential for hypocrisy, that I'm put in mind of an observation made by Mark Steyn several years ago along the lines that it is not necessarily good public policy to codify your own vices. C.S. Lewis once wrote that there is a certain kind of bad man who can not give up his vices without forcing others to do so as well; there is, these days, a different kind of bad man who can not give up his vices, and so seeks to have them subsidized. (Or, as Rochefoucauld put it, "Hypocrisie est un hommage que la vice rend à la vertu.") It's more hypocritical — at least in a bad sense — to insist that one's own vices are virtues than to recognize them, contritely, as vices.Labels: hypocrisy
::: posted by dWj at 11:13 PM
|
