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 . . .

Read more: Growing Pains