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March 25, 2015|

Fools Rush In?

by Scott Yenor|

In response to: Evaluating the Moynihan Report on the Negro Family 50 Years Later

Don’t get into theological arguments with Masters of Divinity, and don’t argue Daniel Patrick Moynihan with his most astute intellectual biographer! That is a good rule of prudence, but fools rush in . . . sometimes.

Moynihan is mostly known in conservative circles for his emphasis on the limits of social policy, and my question concerns the status of those limits. Woodrow Wilson believed in the pragmatic limits of social policy. “All idea of limitation of public authority should be put out of view,” Wilson writes in “Socialism and Democracy,” and the State should consider itself “bound to stop only at what is unwise or futile in its universal superintendence alike of individual and of public interests.” The question I raise about Moynihan is this: Are the limits of social policy limits of technique and knowledge deficit, so that the proper reaction to them is “not yet”—or are they sown into the nature of things, so that the proper reaction to attempts at social engineering is “never”?

Many Progressives talk the “not yet” talk in a lot of policy areas, but they mean, just go ahead and try. As someone more inclined to say “never” on certain matters, I honor Moynihan for being somewhat scrupulous about saying “not yet” in such a way that, if the “not yet” means “not until we know enough and have the proper techniques,” it will mean, in effect, “never.” I cannot tell from Moynihan’s Report what the status of those limits are and my suspicion is that he gets his understanding of “limits” from modern science.

My problem with Moynihan is not that he is a liberal or even the last sane liberal (as a recent news article dubbed him), but that he is a social scientist. As a social scientist, he will tend not to have a scrupulous account of boundaries and permanence. The social scientist looks at the family as a dependent variable (this is what I mean by calling the family a “passive agent”), amidst a sea of independent variables (such as white racism, or economic conditions, or a view of the sexes). Then, Moynihan has a view of the family as an independent variable causing individuals (now the dependent variable) from broken families to descend into a “tangle of pathology.”

Social engineers, who would like to see the family reengineered with a new vision in mind, can easily hijack this vision, by re-jiggering the “independent variables” that cause the family. (Did Moynihan, with enthusiastic liberals and cowed conservatives, support, for instance, Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, a piece of social engineering that was supposed to have profound effects on womanly self-image and hence on the family itself?This is a question for another day.)  If Moynihan’s only argument against such experimenting is that we do not know how “yet,” he will always be subject to all of those enthusiastic experimenters who pushed the limits because the limits were not natural or permanent.  The history of Progressivism is just this: Fools rush in where angels, like Moynihan, feared to tread. The fools have won and Moynihan, while seeming to accept their premises about the malleability of things in his Report, descries their confidence and denies their conclusions. That is worth at least one cheer!

I should recognize one more virtue in the man and his thinking—one that Professor Weiner points out very nicely. Now that the family has declined, it is difficult to know how government can “rebuild” it. Certainly it cannot—that is a profound limit on social policy. Governments have pretty effectively participated in the destruction of the family, I think, in various parts of the world. (Think Russia, for instance, where institutions of trust were undermined through state police.) Putting Humpty Dumpty back together again may be a job beyond the limits of human intelligence and the coercive powers of government.  The first rule would be for government to do no harm and do less harm over time—and here I fear Moynihan’s liberalism, or his adherence to the Democratic Party line, would prevent him from taking the first steps against some strains of contemporary feminism.

What Progressives are increasingly left with is cleaning up after the tangle of pathologies and searching for alternatives to the family that might help to mitigate those pathologies. This is the world Moynihan tried to avoid, but it is, sadly, in many ways, our world.

Scott Yenor

Scott Yenor is a professor of political science at Boise State University. He is the author of the forthcoming Recovery of the Family (Baylor), and two other books: Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought (Baylor, 2011) and Hume’s Humanity: The Philosophy of Common Life and Its Limits (Palgrave, 2016). He is also the editor of Reconstruction: Core Documents (Ashbrook, 2018).

About the Author

More Responses

Two Cheers for the Moynihan Report . . . Or One

by Scott Yenor

Knowing what we know today about family breakdown among Americans and across the modern industrialized world, it seems that Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family: The Case for National Action mistakes the particular for the general and might reflect a misunderstanding of the decline of the family. Moynihan’s 1965 Report emphasizes the ways in which…

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From Moynihan to Murphy Brown

by Robin Fretwell Wilson

If there is one thing Pat Moynihan taught us, it is that talking about the family can be fraught with peril. Published at a time when nearly one in four African American children was born outside of marriage—seven times the rate for whites (see Figure 1)—the Moynihan Report gave a “faithful contemporaneous portrait” as Greg…

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Owning the American Past

by Susan Love Brown

One of the advantages of looking at The Negro Family: The Case for National Action after 50 years is perspective. Perspective is a form of knowledge that allows us to see from a different vantage point and to bring new information to bear on a problem. In responding to Greg Weiner’s essay, I bring the…

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The Moynihan Report at 50: Greg Weiner Replies

by Greg Weiner

In assessing the Moynihan Report at 50, I have the privilege of far more thoughtful interlocutors than Daniel Patrick Moynihan—who was subjected to a digest of calumnies for the rest of his life—enjoyed on the original product. I am grateful to Scott Yenor, Robin Fretwell Wilson and Susan Love Brown for their thoughtful commentaries. Yenor…

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The Moynihan Report at 50: Greg Weiner Replies
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