While (not) sleeping with my one month old daughter on the couch in the middle of the night, sharing her experience of the latest set of what we call ‘growing pains’—those discomforts (some much more drastic than others) that inevitably arise simply from being a being that develops through time, and must so develop in order to be at all—I got to thinking about the figurative deployment of this class name in political contexts. The chronically optimistic Einstein, in December 1930, describing Nazi electoral successes as a result of “the chronic ‘childish disease of the [Weimar] Republic’” is a classic example. The sinister Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s analysis of the chaos and violence in post-invasion Iraq, in April 2003, as “‘part of the price’ for freedom and democracy” is a more recent one.

I do not mean here to assess the appropriateness of this trope. I hope only to clarify for myself, and perhaps for others, why it is that we might wish for “growing pains” to be an apt representation of such political phenomena.

To begin with the obvious: the phenomena in the face of which we aim to deploy this trope are, if not inherently noxious (as in the case of Einstein’s usage, or Rumsfeld’s), certainly of the sort that no one in their right mind would “choose for its own sake,” as Aristotle puts it so well. We look at events that, in and of themselves, we either wish would never have happened, or at least would not have wished to have happened. And, reaching for the familial and biological phenomenon of ‘growing pains,’ we try to “see the good” in such regrettable developments. Just as, we think, no one would wish for the fevers and diarrhea that accompany an infant’s first teeth, but we welcome those fevers and sleepless nights insofar as we know there is no way that this child will come to be what she was born to be without such fevers.

I would like to stress two characteristics of this metaphorical response to political phenomena: calling them “growing pains” places such events within the realm of the family, and of nature, in order to (re-)figure the event, itself inherently negative, as “a necessary stop on the way to something better,” precisely by taking what is in itself a very public and political development, and (re-)figuring it as something somehow private (familial) and unavoidable (natural). Why do we do this? Why might it work?

It seems to me that the power of the appeal to the familial dimension of “growing pains” rests in two facets of this feature. First, the family is a cyclical phenomenon. To be sure, there is the linear (lineal) dimension to the family, and all the more so in a culture where genealogy (in the sense of Genesis more than Foucault) is prized. All the same, a no less fundamental characteristic of the family is its ceaseless propagation in a circle, and not in a straight line; generation after generation, life is brought in to the world, blooms in youth, brings new life into the world, and then fades back into death, while another generation (the second or third “down the line”) continues the cycle by entering the world. Second, the family connotes safety and security, more than any other “meme,” more even than “cops on the streets,” big aircraft carriers, or ICBMs. In reaching for the image of “growing pains” for these political phenomena, then, we “borrow” the cyclical and the safe from the “terrain” of family life, and re-appropriate them for the sake of feeling a bit more stable and a bit more secure in our very unstable and very insecure political lives.

This also points to the value of the ‘naturalness’ of growing pains. As much as this trope calls to mind the family, it calls to mind also the ineluctable and eternal elements of all natural processes as such. “Growing pains” are what they are, and we remind ourselves of their nature, precisely because they are now what they always were and always will be. It’s just that the “site” has changed. My grandmother had these pains; my father; myself; my daughter: the pains are what they are. There’s nothing to do about them. If this is also true for undesirable events in the public realm, well, that would surely be very convenient, for we who find these events distasteful but don’t know what to do to ameliorate them.

I said at the outset that I do not wish to editorialize about the political deployment of “growing pains.” While that is true, I do believe it impossible to deny that my analysis here calls for some skepticism. It may very well be the case that undesirable current events in the world of politics and publicity are just blips on the screen, on the way to something better. In appealing to the image of “growing pains” as Einstein did in 1930, or Rumsfeld in 2003, we stride too far. True “growing pains” belong to the sort of phenomenon that is what it ever was: the cyclical and stable self-perpetuation of life in the family, say, or the constant and unchanging self-maintenance of an organic being as a whole. Politics, for better and worse, it seems to me, is much more a phenomenon of flux. In public affairs, one is tempted to say that one never steps in the same river even once. The epistemic certainty required to dismiss something undesirable, like my daughter’s gastric distress at two in the morning, as “growing pains,” and therefore, something that simply must be abided, distracts us from the all-too-pressing reality that we must do something other than simply wait for it to pass.