It seems that, to Rousseau, children were indeed a punishment:
Twice in [the Confessions] he defends himself about [abandoning] the babies, and he returns to the subject in his Reveries and in various letters. In all, his efforts to justify himself, publicly and privately, spread over twenty-five years.... They merely make matters worse, since they compound cruelty and selfishness with hypocrisy. First, he blamed the wicked circle of intellectuals among whom he then moved for putting the idea of the orphanage into his innocent head. Then, to have children was 'an inconvenience'. He could not afford it. 'How could I achieve the tranquillity of mind necessary for my work, my garret filled with domestic cares and the noise of children?' He would have been forced to stoop to degrading work, to 'all those infamous acts which fill me with such justified horror'. 'I know full well no father is more tender than I would have been' but he did not want his children to have any contact with Thérèse's mother: 'I trembled at the thought of entrusting mine to that ill-bred family.' As for cruelty, how could anyone of his outstanding moral character be guilty of such a thing? '...my ardent love of the great, the true, the beautiful and the just; my horror of evil of every kind, my utter inability to hate or injure or even to think of it; the sweet and lively emotion which I feel at the sight of all that is virtuous, generous and amiable; is it possible, I ask, that all these can ever agree in the same heart with the depravity which, without the least scruple, tramples underfoot the sweetest of obligations? Never, for a single moment in his life, could Jean-Jacques have been a man without feeling, without compassion, or an unnatural father.'Jeepers, this dude is a nut-job! Whatta bunch of double-speak. Johnson points out that "one modern academic" [I. W. Allen] lists Rousseau's "shortcomings" as follows:
he was a 'maochist, exhibitionist, neurasthenic, hypochondriac, onanist, latent homosexual afflicted by the typical urge for repeated displacements, incapable of normal or parental affection, incipient paranoiac, narcissist introvert rendered unsocial by his illness, filled with guilt feelings, pathologically timid, a kleptomaniac, infantilist, irritable and miserly'.An "interesting madman," indeed!
But back to the President's seeming to regard children — at least pre-born ones — as possibly being "punishments." Which brings us to the horror of the Hopital des Enfants-trouvés — the State-run orphanage of Rousseau's day, and all the abandoned infants in its "care," with such poor nurturing and survival prospects.
A Progressive Leftist would say that this is the very situation that abortion-on-demand obviates. So if a woman feels "punished" (in whatever way she can justify to herself) by the child in her womb, it is just perfectly "rational" to abort it — it helps her, it helps "society."
Of course, the Progressive Left is rooted in Rousseaean "thought." And as such it is motivated, bottom-line, by selfishness, envy, cruelty, contempt for life and liberty, hypocrisy....
Seems to me Obama's rhetorical style (and probably his morality) closely resembles Rousseau's....
Thanks so much for writing dearest sister in Christ!
Rousseau’s utopian philosophy informed and fueled the French Terror and ultimately, the utopianist agenda of the scientific materialists in control of the Soviet Union.
Catholic philosopher, historian, and political theorist Dr. Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) conducts a penetrating examination of utopian thought in his work, “Utopia: The Perennial Heresy.” After examining the thought of major utopians, including the Gnostics, the Manicheans, Saint-Simon, Karl Marx and Teilhard de Chardin, he concludes that utopianism is a persistant historical phenomenon seriously at odds with orthodox Christian realism, the main support of Western civilization.
Molnar adds that the utopian–whether religious or atheistic—aims at the deification of man....not all men by any means but rather the few, the select.
But deification has a very high price, said Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who goes on to describe in detail the secret motivations underlying the utopian thinking of Rousseau, Marx, et al.
The Inquisitor is not the Devil. He is rather someone like Marx (or Rousseau) whose mind is in tune with the Devils’. He does the Devil’s work. In the following dialogue, both the Inquisitor and the devil will be speaking.
The Inquisitor reveals that men really do not want to be free in the knowledge of good and evil and adds that it is God’s fault that things are in such a bad way.
During His time spent here on earth as the Christ, His cardinal error was in exalting spiritual freedom and the spiritual bread of heaven above everything else. The Christ sought man’s love through faith freely chosen, but the effect of this has been to create man the rebel, said the Inquisitor. This is because God’s greatest gift to man is spiritual freedom, but freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil is a torment to man, his greatest anguish.
The devil, the spirit of nihilism, that “wise and dread spirit, the spirit of destruction and non-existance” had warned Jesus Christ of the true nature of man during His temptation in the wilderness. The secret was made known but ignored by Christ because He would not deprive men of freedom.
The secret is this: the promised bread of heaven can never compare with “earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man.” Mankind wants to worship its belly in a utopian community of worship, said the devil.
The devil explains that the community of worship requires certain characteristics in confomity with man’s true nature.
It must be established so that there is no disputing about it. This requirement can only be met through the Devil’s own virtues: moral relativism, tolerance, inclusion, hedonism, and androgyny—denial of male and female distinctions. Earthly bread of every sort fills these requirements better than heavenly bread.
Man is fully capable of deceiving himself into surrendering his freedom, observed the devil, but only to those who are skillful enough to appease his conscience. Man wants to hear the words, “It’s not your fault” “You could not help yourself” “You could not be expected to know better”
In conclusion, the devil tells the Christ that men are essentially slaves incapable of free love, thus their God-given freedom is an anguish that manifests itself as self-destructive rebellion. Despite this, they crave a universal state so ordered as to promote free indulgence of their sin nature without any feelings of guilt and without the risk of spiritual suicide.
The sum of human nature explained the Inquisitor, is the desire to have “someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap, for the craving of universal unity (egalitarian oneness)is the third and last anguish of men.” (Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Ellis Sandoz, 117-1i9)