My not very palatable theory of change

but it won’t kill you

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan

— The Beatles, “Revolution”

In a talk at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute on February 14, conservative columnist David Brooks laid out a theory of change.

Edmund Burke, who’s one of my heroes, he thought change should be constant, but always incremental. And he said, you should practice on society the way you would prepare surgery on your father. You should be gentle, non-invasive as possible. And so I don’t want to dismantle because, despite my critiques, here I am.

I don’t identify as a political conservative the way Brooks does, but I resonate strongly with his point about the danger of abrupt change. In a brief to the United States Supreme Court in 1982, I also quoted Burke, who argued that:

the temporary possessors and life rentors… should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance. . . [lest they] leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of a habitation.

Speaking of the society into which each of us is born, Burke argued that it is always wrong to “hack that aged parent in pieces.”