Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  Not long ago I was asked to tape a discussion of the judiciary to be used in conjunction with a college textbook on American government. I asked why a tape was needed for college students and was told, “They don’t read. They don’t even read for pleasure. If they are given a reading assignment, they feel agony—which is why the textbooks are becoming shorter and dumber.” As somebody said, this is a generation that watches and rewinds. “There is a name for what happens when people pursue a pleasure so relentlessly that the more they ingest in the pursuit of happiness, the more they need, and the less happy, in general, they end up…. The word is addiction. Entertainment is the national dope.”15

  In chart after chart in the NAS report, one sees a number (of required courses, class days, etc.) in 1914, then a gradual falling off in 1939 and 1964, followed by a precipitous decline to 1993. This confirms a pattern repeatedly suggested in this book: trends slowly moving through an area of life, in this case higher education, until the Sixties when those trends accelerated rapidly. This suggests, as noted earlier, that we would in any event have eventually arrived where the Sixties took us but perhaps two or three decades later. Which in turn suggests that we are merely seeing the playing out of qualities—individualism and egalitarianism—inherent in Western civilization and to some degree unique to that civilization.

  Decreasing competence is only the beginning of the story. Intellect loses its virtue when it ceases to seek truth and turns to the pursuit of political ends. Not all of this is seriously intended. We have reached the point described by Ortega y Gasset in which many of our intellectuals have abandoned the traditional standards of scholarship and have begun to kick up their heels and stand on their heads to pass the time. Even during the student rebellions of the Sixties and early Seventies it was evident that many of the rebels were playing at being revolutionaries, having fun watching the faculties and administrations cower. On today’s faculties they continue to ridicule bourgeois standards, and their effects are pernicious.

  But there are more serious types, teachers who see themselves as political activists whose campaign headquarters just happen to be the classroom. Professors openly describe themselves as advocates for radical change in the society. They teach courses to make converts to an ideology, always a liberal to left ideology. One might suppose that this proselytizing would be done covertly, as the milder forms of liberal propaganda used to be spread before the Sixties radicals became tenured faculty, but that is not the case. Radical faculty openly boast of their purposes and offer two justifications. The first suggests that standards may be subverted or abandoned if the need is great enough. That is the case today because this society is corrupt and oppressive and urgently needs drastic reform or restructuring. The second justification argues that standards are actually not being altered or abandoned: all teaching is inevitably political—if a professor tries to teach a subject objectively, he is a knave or a fool, since he is, knowingly or unknowingly, reinforcing a corrupt status quo.

  The first argument we may simply brush aside. America today is the least oppressive and corrupt society, in the sense the radicals mean, in the history of the world. Whole shelves of books have been written to prove that what looks like openness and tolerance is actually a subtle form of repression. But these books are by fools and knaves, the sort of people who were assuring us that one communist government after another was a workers’ paradise while the actual workers were doing their utmost to escape those paradises and, often enough, losing their lives in the attempt.

  The second justification for political teaching and scholarship is true, up to a point. If a professor of traditional views protests that he never used his classroom authority for political ends, the response is that of course he did, he was just not sufficiently self-aware to realize the political nature of all teaching, thought, and scholarship. Indeed, the effort to abide by traditional standards of scholarship, and teaching itself, rest upon a political (or moral) judgment. As of course they do: the judgment is that men will be freer and happier if truth is sought, and the results of the search confirmed or rejected, without regard to the political implications of the outcome. The ultimate premise of the enterprise is political and moral, but it is a politics and a morality that command that the inquiry set in motion be nonpolitical and neutral.

  The politically motivated scholar and teacher is engaged in a dishonest act: pretending that his conclusions are reached impartially when they are not. This is particularly pernicious when the modern liberal scholar speaks to the public as an expert but is really concealing a political agenda behind his credentials. During Edward Levi’s tenure as Attorney General of the United States, a highly charged dispute about his duties under a statute arose between the Department of Justice and a congressional committee. Liberals were on the side of the committee, and soon professors of law were being recruited to sign a statement that there was no legal validity to Levi’s position. One such canvasser approached a friend of mine for his signature. My friend declined on the ground that he knew nothing about that area of the law and could not judge whether the committee or the Attorney General was right. The law professor doing the canvassing said: “You don’t understand. This isn’t a legal issue; it’s political.” Yet the petition was to be presented to the press and the public as the expert opinion of law professors on a question of law. Again and again, one sees university faculty speaking to issues and demanding respect for their opinions because of their special competence and expertise when what is offered is no more than a camouflaged political statement. This is so common that it is taken for granted in the academic world. If you see a letter or a petition with many signatories and purporting to state an expert opinion, you can be almost certain that a majority of those signing have never read the relevant materials and their opinions are politics masquerading as professional expertise.

  It is obviously easier to politicize fields like law or history or literature, but not even the natural sciences are wholly immune. A few years back the New York Times reported that paleontologists who doubted the theory that dinosaurs’ extinction was caused by the impact on the earth of an enormous meteor were called “militarists” by their colleagues and felt their careers threatened. The reason was that the theory was used as support for the notion that nuclear war would throw up enormous quantities of dust that would block sunlight and cause a “nuclear winter,” writing finis to the human race. The dinosaur extinction theory was too valuable to one side of a political argument about nuclear weapons to be decided on its scientific merits.

  This is but a small example of the tyranny of political correctness that has spread across American campuses. A few years back there was a burst of denunciation from all segments of the political spectrum when the phenomenon became known. A friend of mine laughed and said, “It’s a rout. They are discredited completely.” Unfortunately, it was not a rout. The janissaries of the Left are infinitely adaptable in their tactics but they do not abandon their strategic objective. They denied there was such an animal as political correctness, they claimed it was a term invented by extreme right-wingers to discredit liberals. (Conservatives are always referred to as extreme and right-wing to distinguish them from radicals of the Left who, we are to understand, spend their time in the middle of the road.) Meanwhile, however, the tyranny of political correctness goes on. As the sociologist Paul Hollander describes the situation:

  PC is, above all, a climate of opinion, a complex of social and institutional pressures and threats, beliefs and taboos which have come to dominate the campuses and academic public discourse over the past quarter century….

  There are at least five areas to which PC applies and where it succeeded in imposing a fair amount of conformity. They are: 1) race-minority relations; 2) sexual and gender relations; 3) homosexuality; 4) American society as a whole; 5) Western culture and values. In regard to each, PC prescribes publicly acceptable opinions and attitudes which are often conveyed on the campuses by required courses, freshman orien
tation, sensitivity training, memoranda by administrators, speech codes, harassment codes, official and student publications and other means.

  Deviation from the norms of PC may result in public abuse, ostracism, formal or informal sanctions, administrative reproach, delayed promotion, difficulty of finding a job, being sentenced to sensitivity training, etc.16

  It is impossible to imagine that academic inquiry flourishes where thought police abound. Indeed, the intellectual apparatus of the Sixties radicals now dominating the universities is built for intellectual repression and not for inquiry. “The ‘sixties’ culture had tried to reinterpret history in terms of race, class, and gender.”17 These categories played little part in recent history, including such momentous developments as the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and its satellites. The important factors there were ones the New Left had ignored or derided—nationalism, religion, and the struggle for freedom and democracy through a free-market economy. Their analysis failed when applied to the United States as well. “The [race-class-gender] model, however, was flawed because it did not make adequate allowance for those multiple loyalties that transcended those of mere race and ethnicity.” Race, class, and gender are not adequate tools of analysis; they are expressions of resentment, claims of oppression. They are thus better suited to attack than to analysis.

  Intellect is in decline in other ways, however. One is the refusal of many Americans to apply reasoning to their beliefs.18 Another is the rejection of the very idea of rationality. As to the first, we have become so accustomed to the astrology column in the daily paper that we no longer reflect on just how preposterous it is that people in a highly scientific and rational culture should pay any attention at all to astrology, a subject that should have died with pre-scientific ages. Yet a psychiatrist told me he estimated that about 25 percent of his colleagues believed in astrology. Important people, like a First Lady of the United States, arrange their affairs according to astrologers’ advice. There are, in fact, ten times as many astrologers as astronomers in this country.

  I remember laughing out loud when on the cab ride from LaGuardia airport to Manhattan I saw a billboard offering psychic counseling over a 900 telephone number. Who could be foolish enough to pay to listen to a psychic? Lots of people, apparently. Now the psychics advertise on television. Television, in apparently respectable programs, hosted by men with deep authoritative voices, informs us of the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, the mystic powers of Egyptian pyramids, the landings of extraterrestrial spacemen among primitive peoples millennia ago, the lost continent of Atlantis, the enigma of crop circles, sightings of Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster.†

  That all of this is nonsense is never allowed to intrude upon the flow of misinformation. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that Americans believe so much that simply is not so. That might not be a problem, except that many of them arrange their personal lives in accordance with these myths and probably form their opinions of public policies on the same basis.

  Quite another form of irrationality afflicts portions of our intelligentsia: the astounding claim that rationality itself is neither possible nor legitimate. We have seen that some radical feminists make this claim, as do some racial essentialists; in both cases they claim that what counts as rationality is socially constructed, that there are different ways of knowing, which means that reality has no stable content, not even in principle. The denial that rationality, now routinely derided as “logocentrism,” is legitimate or perhaps even possible is closely related to the politicization of intellectual fields.

  In the universities, as John R. Searle notes, there are challenges “not just to the content of the curriculum but to the very conceptions of rationality, truth, objectivity, and reality that have been taken for granted in higher education, as they have been taken for granted in our civilization at large.” These qualities are rejected “even as ideals”20 This did not occur because a large number of people recently had the insight that these ideals were false or impossible of achievement. This rejection occurred, rather, because the more advanced modern liberals saw that their political and cultural agendas were vulnerable to rational thought. That was the reason the European fascists rejected rationality as a prop to the old, corrupt order—-just as our American fascists, the New Left, decried objectivity for that reason. Those issuing such challenges today are the emotional—one hesitates to say intellectual—heirs of the New Left, and in many cases are not the heirs but the same people.

  This is anti-intellectualism carried as far as it can possibly go. Hofstadter assumed, as was conventional among academics of his time, that anti-intellectualism was a right-wing phenomenon. If that was ever true, it is certainly not the case today. In an excellent book, Higher Superstition,21 Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt profess a certain puzzlement that the attacks on science and indeed on rationality should now come not just from within the universities but from the academic left. “What defines [that left], as much as anything else, is a deep concern with cultural issues, and, in particular, a commitment to the idea that fundamental political change is urgently needed and can be achieved only through revolutionary processes rooted in the wholesale revision of cultural categories.”22 The academic left does not offer a consistent body of doctrine but rather a variety of doctrines, many of them in conflict with one another. “What enables them to coexist congenially, in spite of gross logical inconsistencies, is a shared sense of injury, resentment, and indignation against modern science.”23

  That sense of injury, resentment, and indignation attaches to much else besides science. The attack on the natural sciences is but part of a larger rejection of the culture of the West, one more continuation of the Sixties: “[M]any of the academics who are most actively hostile toward standard science are affiliated, formally or informally, with areas of study that first arose during the sixties—women’s studies, ethnic studies, environmental studies, and so forth.”24 These studies are, almost by definition, anti-intellectual. With respect to science as with respect to the other objects of their hostility, the Left, and not least its academic branch, is ill-informed and illogical.

  Gross and Levitt argue that scientific skepticism, its insistence on internal logical consistency and empirical verification, has been an invaluable weapon against intellectual authoritarianisms that sustained social systems based on exploitation, domination, and absolutism. Thus, the scientific enterprise was egalitarian and seen as a leading feature of the progress of liberalism. They then remark that our era is singular in that this understanding has “come under strident and increasingly scornful attack, not from reactionaries and traditionalists, who have always feared science, but from its natural heirs—the community of thinkers, theoreticians, and activists who challenge both the material injustices of the existing social system and the underlying assumptions and prejudices that perpetuate them.”25

  It is necessary here to protest a bit. It is not at all clear that the “natural heirs” of the scientific enterprise would perceive material injustices or false assumptions that perpetuate injustices in the existing social system. This sounds like a call for the massive restructuring of society without making the point explicit. A minor annoyance of the book is that the authors repeatedly strain so hard to distance themselves from anything that might sound conservative that they are in danger of throwing their backs out. It is typical that in a footnote, they offhandedly deplore multinational corporations. The authors assume an equivalence in bad faith between the “academic left” and the “academic right.” What academic right? There is no academic right. The academic world is not symmetrical. The Left is fundamentally hostile to American culture and the economy. It would like to overthrow basic institutions and remake the world. This Left has been that way since the Sixties. There is no comparable group on “the right.” There are a few academic conservatives, but they do not propose any attack upon our culture, polity, and economy with the object of drastic restructuring. Today’s academic conservatives at
tempt to preserve what is left of a culture the Sixties virtually destroyed or, at their most ambitious, to reconstitute such parts of that culture that seem valuable. They hardly deserve to be equated with the dishonest and destructive academic Left.

  The explanation for the Left’s new hostility to science—or, more broadly, to rationality—may not be as mysterious as the authors think. The scientific temper may have been an invaluable ally to egalitarians when there were powerful intellectual authoritarianisms (or hierarchies) to be battled, but of what use is that temper to egalitarians when the authoritarianisms have been routed? It is even somewhat difficult to think of authoritarianisms that needed opposition in recent memory. There is, of course, an increasingly authoritarian federal government, but the scientific temper has been no threat to the incursions of government, nor would egalitarians wish government power to be opposed. They need governments coercive power to impose their (so far) mini-tyrannies. The only other institution to presume to speak authoritatively in this century in America has been religion. And science, or a dogmatic and inflated version of the scientific outlook, has certainly diminished the authority of religion. So scientific skepticism and rationality, having finished their work (so far as egalitarians are concerned), are now superfluous or, worse, dangerous.

  They are dangerous to the Left because radical individualism and radical egalitarianism are pernicious points of view that cannot withstand empirical investigation and rational analysis. Most women’s studies, racial and ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies are intellectual hoaxes, programs of propaganda and mutual support. It is hardly surprising that denials of the possibility of rationality should come from groups whose excuse for existence is threatened by rational inquiry. The knowledge that science produces, moreover, often results in a picture of the world that is anathema to the more rabid egalitarians, for that knowledge may demonstrate that there is a hard, concrete reality blocking the egalitarians’ path forward. Radical feminism is put in peril by scientific proof that some sex-role differences are inherent and cannot be dismissed as mere social constructs. To multiculturalists, empirical investigation is dangerous because it will demonstrate that not all cultures are equal in their capacity to equip their members for success in the modern world. Contrary to the claims of the multiculturalists, there are not different ways of knowing. There is one way and, though it is accessible to people of all cultures, it had its origins, or at least was brought to its fullest development, in Europe.