Slouching Towards Gomorrah Read online

  Robert H. Bork

  SLOUCHING

  TOWARDS

  GOMORRAH

  MODERN LIBERALISM AND

  AMERICAN DECLINE

  For Mary Ellen, sharer of good days,

  comforter on bleak ones

  There is good reason why William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is probably the most quoted poem of our time. The image of a world disintegrating, then to be subjected to a brutal force, speaks to our fears now.

  THE SECOND COMING

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  Surely some revelation is at hand;

  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

  The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

  When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

  Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  The darkness drops again; but now I know

  That twenty centuries of stony sleep

  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

  When Yeats wrote that in 1919, he may have foreseen that the twentieth century would experience the “blood-dimmed tide,” as indeed it has. But he can hardly have had any conception of just how thoroughly things would fall apart as the center failed to hold in the last third of this century. He can hardly have foreseen that passionate intensity, uncoupled from morality, would shred the fabric of Western culture. The rough beast of decadence, a long time in gestation, having reached its maturity in the last three decades, now sends us slouching towards our new home, not Bethlehem but Gomorrah.

  Contents

  A Word About Structure

  Introduction

  PART I

  1 “The Vertical Invasion of the Barbarians”

  2 What They Did and Where They Went

  3 “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident”:

  The Rage for Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

  4 “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident”:

  The Passion for Equality

  5 “Intellectuals” and Modern Liberalism

  6 The Supreme Court as an Agent of Modern Liberalism

  PART II

  7 The Collapse of Popular Culture

  8 The Case for Censorship

  9 The Rise of Crime, Illegitimacy, and Welfare

  10 Killing for Convenience:

  Abortion, Assisted Suicide, and Euthanasia

  11 The Politics of Sex:

  Radical Feminisms Assault on American Culture

  12 The Dilemmas of Race

  13 The Decline of Intellect

  14 The Trouble in Religion

  15 The Wistful Hope for Fraternity

  PART III

  16 Can Democratic Government Survive?

  17 Can America Avoid Gomorrah?

  Afterword

  Endnotes

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Slouching Towards Gomorrah

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  A Word About Structure

  Part I of this book begins with two chapters about the Sixties because that decade brought to a climax trends that had long been developing in America and in other nations of the West. It was a politicized decade, one whose activists saw all of culture and life as political. The consequence is that our culture is now politicized. It worked the other way as well: our politics is increasingly (we need such a word) culturized. We have a new and extremely divisive politics of personal identity. We have invented a range of new or newly savage political-cultural battlegrounds. Democrats and Republicans have begun to line up on opposing sides of the war in the culture.

  Because my thesis is that these developments have been coming on for a long time and may be inherent in Western civilization, Part I continues with two chapters that examine the themes of liberty and equality, which were celebrated in the Declaration of Independence and are dominant in our culture today. These ideals have been pressed much too far and account for the cultural devastation wrought by modern liberalism. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the forces that advance the agenda of modern liberalism: the “intellectual” class and that class’s enforcement arm, the judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court of the United States.

  Part II, consisting of chapters 7 through 15, examines the particular institutions and areas of cultural warfare that result from the twin thrusts of modern liberalism: radical individualism and radical egalitarianism. This part of the book takes up the collapse of popular culture; the case for censorship; crime, illegitimacy, and welfare; abortion and euthanasia; the politics of sex (radical feminism); the dilemmas of race; the decline of intellect; the trouble in religion; and the fragmentation of our society into warring groups.

  Part III consists of two chapters examining the prospects for the survival of democratic government and the question of whether America can reverse its decline and avoid becoming Gomorrah.

  Introduction

  One morning on my way to teach a class at the Yale law school, I found on the sidewalk outside the building heaps of smoldering books that had been burned in the law library. They were a small symbol of what was happening on campuses across the nation: violence, destruction of property, mindless hatred of law, authority, and tradition. I stood there, uncomprehending, as a photograph in the next day’s New York Times clearly showed. What did they want, these students? What conceivable goals led them to this and to the general havoc they were wreaking on the university? Living in the Sixties, my faculty colleagues and I had no understanding of what it was about, where it came from, or how long the misery would last. It was only much later that a degree of understanding came.

  To understand our current plight, we must look back to the tumults of those years, which brought to a crescendo developments in the Fifties and before that most of us had overlooked or misunderstood. We noticed (who could help but notice?) Elvis Presley, rock music, James Dean, the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, Jack Kerouac and the Beats. We did not understand, however, that far from being isolated curiosities, these were harbingers of a new culture that would shortly burst upon us and sweep us into a different country.

  The Fifties were the years of Eisenhower’s presidency. Our domestic world seemed normal and, for the most part, almost placid. The signs were misleading. Politics is a lagging indicator.

  Culture eventually makes politics. The cultural seepages of the Fifties strengthened and became a torrent that swept through the nation in the Sixties, only to seem to die away in the Seventies. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the defeat of several of the most liberal senators seemed a reaffirmation of traditional values and proof that the Sixties were dead. They were not. The spirit of the Sixties revived in the Eighties and brought us at last to Bill and Hillary Clinton, the very personifications of the Sixties generation arrived at early middle age with its ideological baggage intact.

  This is a book about American decline. Sin
ce American culture is a variant of the cultures of all Western industrialized democracies, it may even, inadvertently, be a book about Western decline. In the United States, at least, that decline and the mounting resistance to it have produced what we now call a culture war. It is impossible to say what the outcome will be, but for the moment our trajectory continues downward. This is not to deny that much in our culture remains healthy, that many families are intact and continue to raise children with strong moral values. American culture is complex and resilient. But it is also not to be denied that there are aspects of almost every branch of our culture that are worse than ever before and that the rot is spreading.

  “Culture,” as used here, refers to all human behavior and institutions, including popular entertainment, art, religion, education, scholarship, economic activity, science, technology, law, and morality. Of that list, only science, technology, and the economy may be said to be healthy today, and it is problematical how long that will last. Improbable as it may seem, science and technology themselves are increasingly under attack, and it seems highly unlikely that a vigorous economy can be sustained in an enfeebled, hedonistic culture, particularly when that culture distorts incentives by increasingly rejecting personal achievement as the criterion for the distribution of rewards.

  With each new evidence of deterioration, we lament for a moment, and then become accustomed to it. We hear one day of the latest rap song calling for killing policemen or the sexual mutilation of women; the next, of coercive left-wing political indoctrination at a prestigious university; then of the latest homicide figures for New York City, Los Angeles, or the District of Columbia; of the collapse of the criminal justice system, which displays an inability to punish adequately and, often enough, an inability even to convict the clearly guilty; of the rising rate of illegitimate births; the uninhibited display of sexuality and the popularization of violence in our entertainment; worsening racial tensions; the angry activists of feminism, homosexuality, environmentalism, animal rights…the list could be extended almost indefinitely.

  So unrelenting is the assault on our sensibilities that many of us grow numb, finding resignation to be the rational, adaptive response to an environment that is increasingly polluted and apparently beyond our control. That is what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan calls “defining deviancy down.”1 Moynihan cites the “Durkheim constant.”2 Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology, posited that there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior any community can “afford to recognize.”3 As behavior worsens, the community adjusts its standards so that conduct once thought reprehensible is no longer deemed so. As behavior improves, the deviancy boundary moves up to encompass conduct previously thought normal. Thus, a community of saints and a community of felons would display very different behavior but about the same amount of recognized deviancy.

  But the Durkheim constant is now behaving in a very odd way. While defining deviancy down with respect to crime, illegitimacy, drug use, and the like, our cultural elites are growing intensely moralistic and disapproving about what had always been thought normal behavior, thus accomplishing what columnist Charles Krauthammer terms “defining deviancy up.”4 It is at least an apparent paradox that we are accomplishing both forms of redefining, both down and up, simultaneously. One would suppose that as once normal behavior became viewed as deviant, that would mean that there was less really bad conduct in the society. But that is hardly our case. Instead, we have redefined what we mean by such things as child abuse, rape, and racial or sexual discrimination so that behavior until recently thought quite normal, unremarkable, even benign, is now identified as blameworthy or even criminal. Middle-class life is portrayed as oppressive and shot through with pathologies. “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling,” Krauthammer wrote, “it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant.”5 This situation is thoroughly perverse. Underclass values become increasingly acceptable to the middle class, especially their young, and middle-class values become increasingly contemptible to the cultural elites.

  That is why there is currently a widespread sense that the distinctive virtues of American life, indeed the distinctive features of Western civilization, are in peril in ways not previously seen. This time the threat is not military…the Soviets and the Nazis are defunct. Nor is it external…the Tartar armies receded from Europe centuries ago. If we slide into a modern, high-tech version of the Dark Ages, we will have done it to ourselves without the assistance of the Germanic tribes that destroyed Roman civilization. This time we face, and seem to be succumbing to, an attack mounted by a force not only within Western civilization but one that is perhaps its legitimate child.

  The enemy within is modern liberalism, a corrosive agent carrying a very different mood and agenda than that of classical or traditional liberalism. That the modern variety is intellectually bankrupt diminishes neither its vitality nor the danger it poses. A bankrupt philosophy can reign for centuries and, when its bankruptcy becomes apparent, may well be succeeded by an even less coherent outlook. That is what is happening to us now. Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason. The response of liberalism was not to turn to religion, which modernity had seemingly made irrelevant, but to abandon reason. Hence, there have appeared philosophies claiming that words can carry no definite meaning or that there is no reality other than one that is “socially constructed.” A reality so constructed, it is thought, can be decisively altered by social or cultural edict, which is a prescription for coercion.

  “Modern liberalism” may not be quite the correct name for what I have in mind. I use the phrase merely to mean the latest stage of the liberalism that has been growing in the West for at least two and a half centuries, and probably longer. Nor does this suggest that I think liberalism was always a bad idea. So long as it was tempered by opposing authorities and traditions, it was a splendid idea. It is the collapse of those tempering forces that has brought us to a triumphant modern liberalism with all the cultural and social degradation that follows in its wake. If you do not think “modern liberalism” an appropriate name, substitute “radical liberalism” or “sentimental liberalism” or even, save us, “post-modern liberalism.” Whatever name is used, most readers will recognize the species.

  The defining characteristics of modern liberalism are radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and radical individualism (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification). These may seem an odd pair, for individualism means liberty and liberty produces inequality, while equality of outcomes means coercion and coercion destroys liberty. If they are to operate simultaneously, radical egalitarianism and radical individualism, where they would compete, must be kept apart, must operate in different areas of life. That is precisely what we see in today’s culture.

  Radical egalitarianism reigns in areas of life and society where superior achievement is possible and would be rewarded but for coercion towards a state of equality. Quotas, affirmative action, and the more extreme versions of feminism are the most obvious examples but, as will be seen, radical egalitarianism is damaging much else in our culture. Radical individualism is demanded when there is no danger that achievement will produce inequality and people wish to be unhindered in the pursuit of pleasure. This finds expression especially in the areas of sexuality and the popular arts.

  Sometimes the impulses of radical individualism and radical egalitarianism cooperate. Both, for example, are antagonistic to society’s traditional morality…the individualist because his pleasures can be maximized only by freedom from authority, the egalitarian because he resents any distinction among people or forms of behavior that suggests superiority in one or the other. When egalitarianism reinforces individualism, denying the possibility that one culture or moral view can be superior to another, the result is cultural and moral chaos, both prominent and destructive features of our
time.

  Radical egalitarianism necessarily presses us towards collectivism because a powerful state is required to suppress the differences that freedom produces. That raises the sinister and seemingly paradoxical possibility that radical individualism is the handmaiden of collectivist tyranny. This individualism, it is quite apparent in our time, attacks the authority of family, church, and private association. The family is said to be oppressive, the fount of our miseries. It is denied that the church may legitimately insist upon what it regards as moral behavior in its members. Private associations are routinely denied the autonomy to define their membership for themselves. The upshot is that these institutions, which stand between the state and the individual, are progressively weakened and their functions increasingly dictated or taken over by the state. The individual becomes less of a member of powerful private institutions and more a member of an unstructured mass that is vulnerable to the collectivist coercion of the state. Thus does radical individualism prepare the way for its opposite.

  Modern liberalism is very different in content from the liberalism of, say, the 1940s or 1950s, and certainly different from the liberalism of the last century. The sentiments and beliefs that drive it, however, are the same: the ideals of liberty and equality. These ideals produced the great political, social, and cultural achievements of Western civilization, but no ideal, however worthy, can be pressed forever without turning into something else, turning in fact into its opposite. That is what is happening now. Not a single American institution, from popular music to higher education to science, has remained untouched.

  In one sense, decline is always with us. To hear each generation of Americans speak of the generation coming along behind it is to learn that our culture is not only deteriorating rapidly today but always has been. Regret for the golden days of the past is probably universal and as old as the human race. No doubt the elders of prehistoric tribes thought the younger generation’s cave paintings were not up to the standard they had set. Given this straight-line degeneration for so many millennia, by now our culture should be not merely rubble but dust. Obviously it is not: until recently our artists did better than the cave painters.