David Brooks can be more moralistic than you might think. In the good old days, he writes,

there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed. . . . That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t.

I’m not in favor of temper tantrums! Or — to fend off Jonah — of immanentizing the eschaton. (Back in 2003, I wrote that the optimal number of Enrons was not zero.) But can’t unreasonable demands and expectations sometimes act as a catalyst for constructive change? It is completely unreasonable for me to want to get money from a wall in any city I happen to be in. But I can, because somebody didn’t accept that we had to stand in line in a bank. Brooks is writing about the underwear bomber and Americans’ demands for better security procedures. He’s right to be wary of ”more protocols, more layers and more review systems” could make things worse. But maybe we could do better. We’re not going to find out if we think we are already in the best of all possible worlds. For once, I disagree with Brooks because I think he is, in a sense, too conservative.