One might extend La Rochefoucauld’s famous maxim that neither the sun nor death can be stared at for long, by saying that no member of the modern liberal intelligentsia can stare at a social problem for very long. He feels the need to retreat into impersonal abstractions, into structures or alleged structures over which the victim has no control. And out of the need to avoid this rawness of reality he spins utopian schemes of social engineering.
-Theodore Dalrymple “Our Culture, What’s left of It.”
