Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  Perhaps the immediate popularity of On Liberty was entirely due to its simplicity, but it is also possible to think that we tend to overrate the power of social philosophers to change the direction of a culture. Perhaps Mill was influential while British legal scholar James Fitzjames Stephen’s contemporary rebuttal7 dropped from sight…until recently it had long been out of print…because the culture was moving towards Mill’s liberalism semiconsciously and gradually adopted this articulation of its inchoate mood. That speculation may be reinforced by the fact that while Mill’s principle became widely known at once, “By a kind of cultural lag the practical implications of Mill’s idea of liberty did not make themselves felt until long after the idea itself had become thoroughly familiar, so familiar that we have almost lost sight of its origin. Only now are we experiencing its full impact.”8 This suggests, perhaps, that the culture created the status of On Liberty as much as the book created the culture. The culture had been moving in the direction of Mill’s principle at least since the Enlightenment. Ms. Himmelfarb notes that Mill’s essay “points to a radical disjunction between the individual and society…indeed, an adversarial relationship.”9 That is precisely what is to be expected of the socially and morally separated individuals the Enlightenment liberals contemplated.

  The idea of liberty has continuous change built into it, precisely because it is hostile to constraints. Men seek the removal of the constraint nearest them. But when that one falls, men are brought against the next constraint, which is now felt to be equally irksome. That is why the agenda of liberalism is in constant motion and liberals of different eras would hardly recognize one another as deserving the same label. Harry Truman would have hated the Sixties, and, because his liberalism contained more powerful constraints on individualism, he was not a liberal in the same sense that Bill Clinton is. The perpetual motion of liberalism was described by T. S. Eliot half a century ago: “That Liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature…. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards something definite.”10 What liberalism has constantly moved away from are the constraints on personal liberty imposed by religion, morality, law, family, and community.

  Liberalism moves, therefore, toward radical individualism and the corruption of standards that movement entails. “By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified … Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.”11

  Chaos, which only government can control, results when other sources of authority are denigrated and diminished. Pierre Manent remarks that liberalism is based on two ideas, one of which is representative government. “The idea of representation postulates that the only legitimate power is founded on the consent of those subject to power. In such a regime, all powers within civil society born from the spontaneous interplay of economic and social life or from traditions come to seem essentially illegitimate since they are not representative. Hence they are slowly but surely eroded.”12 The family is not representative, nor are business organizations, the Catholic Church, or universities. All have been attacked precisely on that ground. If freedom is to be limited in any way, it is argued, that should only be done by the votes or expressed desires of those affected. It also seems apparent that the authority of these institutions has, in varying degrees, been eroded and that of the state, which represents everyone, has been correspondingly enhanced. We already have reason to regret both developments.

  Since liberalism is a movement away from, an impulse, not a stable agenda, it continually revises the agenda it has at any particular moment. That accounts for the gradual transformation of the older or classical liberalism into the radical individualist component of today’s liberalism. Because the desire for and achievement of liberty has moved on in the last half century, Eliot’s version of our decline now seems too optimistic. Many of us would gladly settle for what he regarded as degradation. If our society has abandoned education, in the larger sense in which Eliot meant it, that is probably irreversible in a democratized culture, but he did not foresee that we would then abandon even instruction for self-esteem and multiculturalism. If only we could recover mere instruction in an era when SAT scores decline and the solution is not improved instruction but raising all scores so that students seem more accomplished than they actually are.

  I once made the entirely unoriginal observation that there is an emptiness at the heart of the American ideology, democratic capitalism, and a colleague said that was incorrect, that meaning is given by the idea of the “pursuit of happiness.” But the liberty to pursue happiness means that each of us pursues whatever it is he may desire. We are to move away from restraints in pursuit of we know not what. Such a person leads a precarious existence, for as W. H. Auden said: “Emancipated from the traditional beliefs of a closed society, he can no longer believe simply because his forefathers did and he cannot imagine not believing…he has found no source or principle of direction to replace them…. Liberalism is at a loss to know how to handle him, for the only thing liberalism knows to offer is more freedom, and it is precisely freedom in the sense of lack of necessity that is his trouble.”13

  The mistake the Enlightenment founders of liberalism made about human nature has brought us to this…an increasing number of alienated, restless individuals, individuals without strong ties to others, except in the pursuit of ever more degraded distractions and sensations. And liberalism has no corrective within itself; all it can do is endorse more liberty and demand more rights. Persons capable of high achievement in one field or another may find meaning in work, may find community among colleagues, and may not particularly mind social and moral separation otherwise. Such people are unlikely to need the more sordid distractions that popular culture now offers. But very large segments of the population do not fall into that category. For them, the drives of liberalism are catastrophic.

  The consequences of liberalism, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness pushed too far are now apparent. Irving Kristol writes of “the clear signs of rot and decadence germinating within American society…a rot and decadence that was no longer the consequence of liberalism but was the actual agenda of contemporary liberalism…. [S]ector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other.”14 I would add only that current liberalism’s rot and decadence is merely what liberalism has been moving towards for better than two centuries.

  We can now see the tendency of the Enlightenment, the Declaration of Independence, and On Liberty. Each insisted on the expanding liberty of the individual and each assumed that order was not a serious problem and could be left, pretty much, to take care of itself. And, for a time, order did seem to take care of itself. But that was because the institutions…family, church, school, neighborhood, inherited morality…remained strong. The constant underestimation of their value and the continual pressure for more individual autonomy necessarily weakened the restraints on individuals. The ideal slowly became the autonomous individual who stood in an adversarial relationship to any institution or group that attempted to set limits to acceptable thought and behavior.

  That process continues today, and hence we have an increasingly disorderly society. The street predator of the underclass may be the natural outcome of the mistake the founders of liberalism made. They would have done better had they remembered original sin. Or had they taken Edmund Burke seriously. Mill wrote: “Liberty consists in doing what one desires.”15 That might have been said by a man who was both a libertine and an anarchist; M
ill was neither, but his rhetoric encouraged those who would be either or both. Burke had it right earlier: “The only liberty I mean is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them.”16 “The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risque congratulations, which may soon be turned into complaints.”17 Burke, unlike the Mill of On Liberty, had a true understanding of the nature of men, and balanced liberty with restraint and order, which are, in truth, essential to the preservation of liberty.

  The classical liberalism of the nineteenth century is widely and correctly admired, but we can now see that it was inevitably a transitional phase. The tendencies inherent in individualism were kept within bounds by the health of institutions other than the state, a common moral culture, and the strength of religion. Liberalism drained the power from the institutions. We no longer have a common moral culture and our religion, while pervasive, seems increasingly unable to affect actual behavior.

  Modern liberalism is one branch of the rupture that occurred in liberalism in the last century. The other branch is today called conservatism. American conservatism, neo or otherwise, in fact represents the older classical liberal tradition. Conservatism of the American variety is simply liberalism that accepts the constraints that a clear view of reality, including a recognition of the nature of human beings, places upon the main thrusts of liberalism…liberty and equality. The difference, it has been said, is that between a hard-headed and a sentimental liberalism. Sentimental liberalism, with its sweet view of human nature, naturally evolves into the disaster of modern liberalism.

  “During the past 30 years,” William Bennett writes, “we have witnessed a profound shift in public attitudes.” He cites polls showing that “we Americans now place less value on what we owe others as a matter of moral obligation; less value on sacrifice as a moral good, on social conformity, respectability, and observing the rules; less value on correctness and restraint in matters of physical pleasure and sexuality…and correlatively greater value on things like self-expression, individualism, self-realization, and personal choice.”18 Though I think the shift in public attitudes merely accelerated in the past thirty years, having been silently eroding our culture for much longer, it is clear that our current set of values is inhospitable to the self-discipline required for such institutions as marriage and education and hospitable to no-fault divorce and self-esteem training.

  Our modern, virtually unqualified, enthusiasm for liberty forgets that liberty can only be “the space between the walls,” the walls of morality and law based upon morality. It is sensible to argue about how far apart the walls should be set, but it is cultural suicide to demand all space and no walls.

  4

  “We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident”

  THE PASSION FOR EQUALITY

  Despite its rhetorical vagueness, or because of it, the Declaration of Independence profoundly moved Americans at the time, and does still. The proposition that all men are created equal said what the colonists already believed, and so, as Gordon Wood put it, equality became “the single most powerful and radical ideological force in all of American history.”1 That is true and, though it verges on heresy to say so, it is also profoundly unfortunate.

  The deep emotional, indeed religious, appeal of equality is not, of course, a peculiarly American phenomenon; the ideal informs all of the West. Besides being a matter for regret, the appeal of equality, outside the context of political and legal rights, is puzzling. Neither of those thoughts is new; in fact, they are trite. Writer after writer has demonstrated the pernicious effects of our passion for equality and the lack of any intellectual foundation for that passion. If there is anything new in this book, it is the demonstration of the ill effects of the passion in a variety of contemporary social and cultural fields.

  The Declaration’s pronouncement of equality was sweeping but sufficiently ambiguous so that even slave holders, of whom Jefferson was one, subscribed to it. That ambiguity was dangerous because it invited the continual expansion of the concept and its requirements. The Declaration was not, clearly, a document that was understood at the time to promise equality of condition, not even among white male Americans. The meaning of equality was heavily modified by the American idea of reward according to individual achievement and reverence for private property. But those modifications are hostile to the egalitarian impulse, which constantly expands the areas in which equality is thought desirable or even mandatory. Hence they, like the constraints on the ideas of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, gradually give way before the active principle, in this case ever greater equality.

  The idea of equality began to undergo considerable and worrisome change soon after its enshrinement in the Declaration. Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed the United States for nine months in 1831-32, remarked that Americans loved equality more than freedom. Though Tocqueville found that ominous, it was not until the twentieth century that equality became a serious threat to freedom. The great political upsurge of equality occurred with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal. The names suggest that the cards have been unfairly stacked, that there are inequalities that must be rectified. Since these were sentiments expressed in the political arena, the message was that inequality must be cured by government. No other institution is sufficiently powerful and sufficiently comprehensive in its jurisdiction to undertake the task, which means that the egalitarian passion must always lead to greater centralized power and coercion. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society carried forward what Roosevelt and Truman had begun and accomplished the most thorough-going redistribution of wealth and status in the name of equality that this country had ever experienced. Whether the political movements produced the passion for equality or reflected it…probably the two reinforced one another…is, for the moment, unimportant. The fact is that antihierarchical, egalitarian sentiments were on the rise in political movements, whose tendencies were, therefore, towards collectivism and centralization, with a concomitant decline in the freedoms of business organizations, private associations, families, and individuals. We have come further along that path since the Great Society.

  The general subject of equality may be approached through the topic of economic inequality. It is an almost universal assumption among cultural elites, particularly intellectuals, that inequalities of wealth or income pose a serious problem that the political nation should address. Christopher Lasch, to take but one of many examples, asserted that “economic inequality is intrinsically undesirable…. Luxury is morally repugnant, and its incompatibility with democratic ideals, moreover, has been consistently recognized in the traditions that shape our political culture…. [A] moral condemnation of great wealth must inform any defense of the free market, and that moral condemnation must be backed up with effective political action.”2

  As an empirical matter, Lasch is no doubt correct in saying that many of our political traditions find economic inequality incompatible with democratic ideals. That is merely a way of saying that if you extend the idea of democracy far enough, you arrive at socialism: “one person, one vote” extended to the economic realm. But why anybody should agree with Lasch that such a situation would be desirable is not readily apparent; the basis for his proposition seems no more than a reflexive egalitarianism. If economic inequality is “intrinsically” bad, then it is bad regardless of any consequences, good or bad, such as increases in freedom and productivity or, on the other hand, the social unrest it may be thought to produce.

  What then can be the moral basis for objecting to economic inequality and asserting that condemnation of great wealth, backed up with political action, is essential to any defense of the free market? The obvious candidate is envy. It is impossible to see any objective harm done to the less wealthy by another’s greater wealth. It is not, after all, the case that the richer man’s income is extracted from the poor
er man. Vacationing at the shore, I see a large yacht at anchor in the harbor. Though I may wish I had one, it is quite clear that I do not lack a yacht because another man has one. The economy is not a zero/sum game. A Rockefeller’s or a Bill Gates’s or a Michael Jackson’s wealth does not diminish my wealth or anybody else’s. (It is irrelevant to the present point to note that political action to deprive such folks of their luxuries would, because of its adverse effects on incentives, make the rest of us poorer.)

  Nor is it at all clear why luxury should be morally repugnant. If luxury is inconsistent with the democratic ideals that have shaped our political culture, that means only that some of our democratic “ideals” are the product of envy. Envy has been said to be pure evil because it wishes to deprive others even though we gain nothing for ourselves. That is not quite the case. The political action Lasch called for results in redistribution. It may be that academic intellectuals would gain only the satisfaction of seeing the better off lessened, but there are many classes of people who will receive income that is transferred to them from the wealthy through government. For such folks, the emotion of envy is reinforced by cupidity. Much of the wealth will accrue to the bureaucrats who accomplish the redistribution but who would otherwise be employed in the private sector. (We are not discussing here the case of redistributions to persons who would otherwise fall below a subsistence level. Such redistributions result from compassion rather than envy.)

  Envy certainly has shaped and continues to shape our political culture. That is probably why it is front-page news in the New York Times that the United States displays greater inequality in wealth than other industrialized nations.3 The unstated assumption that makes this worthy of the front page is that there is something morally wrong, even shameful, in having greater wealth inequalities than other societies. The problem allegedly posed is not about an inequality between those who do and do not have enough money to subsist or to lead a life free of want. The problem raised is the inequality between persons or families that are above that line.