That naysayer was Edmund Burke, who wrote a nuanced essay to explain what he saw as the problem.
In the Reflections, Burke argued that the French Revolution would end disastrously because its abstract foundations, purportedly rational, ignored the complexities of human nature and society.
Further, he focused on the practicality of solutions instead of the metaphysics, writing "What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor"
In today's world, the closest thing to Burke is Moynihan. And Chronicles reposts an essay on him HERE
In fact, Moynihan made some of the noblest protests of his time against what he called “the manifest decline of the American civil order,” not least in his essay on liberal linguistic euphemism and evasion, “Defining Deviancy Down,” in The American Scholar.
but his most remembered essay is his warning about allowing the destruction of the family.
And he never tired of reiterating unflattering, painfully learned home truths: “The family is the basic social unit of American life; it is the basic socializing unit. By and large, adult conduct is learned in the family.”
This was particularly poignant coming from the son of a broken family, a poor inner-city New York kid whose father had absconded when he was young.
Though Moynihan was viciously and repeatedly attacked from the left as a racist for his report on the collapsing black family, the African-American sociologist Glenn C. Loury has recently argued that these attacks were not only utterly unfair but ultimately tragic in shutting down analysis and debate on the subject.heads up TeaAtTrianon.
Sigh. And since then, we see the collapse of the family in all races, starting with the sexual revolution that mad sex a moral free zone, easy divorce that made marriage the only contract that could be broken without impunity by one side, and now made worse by gender theory that ignores the reality of biology and the rules devised pragmatically by our ancestors so that families would stay intact.
one recent example is the attack on some professors who said we need to emphasize middle class values that include the values of hard work and fidelity to marriage.
The elites called them racist for doing so, but I wonder: what race are they talking about?
It seems to me the "race" the professors are criticizing is the white sexually liberated culture pushed by the elites, in movies and TV and in government policies. No one wants to discuss how these ideas have been busy destroying the family for the last fifty years.
Where is multiculturalism when we need it?
Attention: These are the same rules that Confucius devised to counter the societal and political chaos of his time. Save the family and the culture/country will be saved.
And those of us who worked in Africa know well that similar values of hard work and caring for one's family is even stricter than the WASP values: because in Africa, you have to care for the young, old, and crippled in your extended family, which in the USA is outsourced to the government.
that is why Africans see western values as anathema: American individualism translates into the idea that it's okay to ignore your poorer relatives.
Success translates to the idea it's okay to get ahead without any limits, leading to cheating and take bribes in business and politics.
And modern sexual liberation leads to a million street kids without fathers wandering around, and giving a wink to the sexual predators, both hetero and homosexual, who prey on the less powerful (relatives, street kids, students, employees, etc.)
Sigh.
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