Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, by Robert H. Bork (Regan Books/Harper Collins, 1996, 382 pp.; $25). Reviewed by Ernest W. Lefever, senior fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, D.C.
On receiving the Medal of Freedom in Washington in May, Billy Graham said that “the greatest nation in history stands on the brink of self-destruction.” In his new book, Robert H. Bork, the eminent constitutional scholar, pronounces a similar judgment. After marshaling evidence of America’s cultural and political decline, Bork concludes we are well on the road to nihilism and spiritual chaos, if not on the cusp of a new Dark Age.
In Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Judge Bork lays much of the blame on “modern liberalism”—a pernicious world-view rooted in the Enlightenment’s emphasis on unaided reason and the French Revolution’s demand for “radical egalitarianism.” Modern liberalism, he says, has “a very different mood and agenda” from traditional liberalism, which advanced the quest for ordered liberty and democracy.
Like other conservatives, Bork asserts that America’s liberal elite—politically correct academics, clergy, journalists, entertainers, and foundation staffs—have captured the culture and are polluting it with permissiveness, sloth, illegitimacy, smut, and crime. And with the aid of modern technology, the rot symbolized by rap music, Madonna, and MTV is bound to increase, short of a miracle.
Many who agree with Bork’s dismay with the “profane manifestations of popular culture” will question his call for censorship. In the climate of freedom and limited government embraced by the Constitution, Americans have long exercised self-censorship flowing from the norms set by religion and morality as expressed in families and communities. But these essential social restraints have been eroded by a “rampant individualism” that makes everyone his own judge of right and wrong.
Thus, Bork argues, nonpatronage, boycotts, and V-chips are not enough to stop the flow of filth. Though he is vague on details—in which the Devil always resides—he suggests that Congress, not the Supreme Court, could somehow establish guidelines to help curb the mad rush to “a disorderly, hedonistic, and dangerous society,” adding, “The government ought not try to impose virtue, but it can deter incitements to vice.”
But censorship, even if desirable, is not the ultimate answer. What is needed, Bork holds, is a genuine religious revival and a vigorous reaffirmation of our Judeo-Christian moral heritage. “Perhaps the most promising development of our time,” he suggests, “is the rise of an energetic, optimistic, and politically sophisticated religious conservatism,” because its objectives are “cultural and moral” as well as political. This emphasis will come as a surprise to those who think of Bork, who has no formal religious affiliation, as an agnostic. Actually, he recently called himself a “generic Protestant.” He attended a Presbyterian Sunday school until he was 12 and lately has been reading C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot.
In an intriguing passage, Bork discusses which came first, religion or morality. He acknowledges the solid bond between faith and ethics, but says it is possible for some individuals to possess virtue without professing a religious faith. Like T. S. Eliot, he believes there is a secular ethic that lives off the moral capital provided by religion. But since that moral capital has been dangerously eroded in recent decades, a “Western society in which Christianity has been dominant—cannot retain its virtue when religion has lapsed.” Keep tuned.
In Bork’s view, America’s religious elite, who should be the custodians and renewers of our spiritual and moral heritage, are a major part of the problem. Many liberal Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders have betrayed their birthright. Their attack on the Religious Right for political activism is disingenuous because the religious Left has been politically active “throughout our history,” and never more so than in the 1960s, when the radicals were “outrageously opposed to traditional values and institutions.”
Judge Bork often sounds like an angry Old Testament prophet, but his somber message is frequently punctuated by barbs of ironic humor. Example: Once when he criticized “Michael Jackson’s crotch-clutching performance at the Super Bowl,” a colleague said “that it was precisely the desire to enjoy such manifestations of American culture that had brought down the Berlin wall.” Bork retorted, “That seems as good an argument as any for putting the wall back up again.”
Bork’s message is grim, but not without hope. While decadence and nihilism are rampant today, much in America is “good and healthy,” he says. There are signs of hope. “Americans are becoming restless under the tyrannies of egalitarianism and sick of the hedonistic individualism that has brought us to the suburbs of Gomorrah. But, for the immediate future … we probably face … an increasingly vulgar, violent, chaotic, and politicized culture. Our hope, our struggles, … must be for the long run.”
Apart from broad cultural analysis, Slouching Towards Gomorrah advances Bork’s views on a number of social policy issues. Forceful and articulate as always, he gives readers plenty to argue with. (Many, for instance, will question the wisdom of his proposal to amend the Constitution so that any federal or state court decision—including decisions of the Supreme Court—can be overturned by a simple majority in Congress.) No one, however, who shares a sense of what Gertrude Himmelfarb has called the “de-moralization of America” will dissent from the urgency of Bork’s message.
An Excerpt Can America avoid Gomorrah?It is pointless to ask, “What is the solution?” There is no single grand strategy. Just as the New Left abandoned an overarching program and became a series of like-minded groups advancing area by area, so it must be counterattacked area by area. Religion must be recaptured church by church; and education, university by university, school board by school board. Bureaucracies must be tamed. The judiciary must be criticized severely when it oversteps its legitimate authority, as it now regularly does. A few of the necessary actions must involve the government, as in capturing and punishing criminals, and, perhaps, in administering censorship of the vilest aspects of our popular culture; otherwise, government must be kept at a distance.
-From Slouching Towards Gomorrah.
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