Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  One of the most important aspects of these institutions—Berger and Neuhaus call them “mediating structures”; Nisbet calls them “intermediate associations”—is that they stand as buffers between the individual and the state. They do that, in part, by performing functions for individuals that the state would otherwise perform. The difficulty is that, ever since the New Deal, the state has increasingly ousted the institutions of civil society and taken over their functions or controlled them.

  It is proposed to attempt to restore these intermediate institutions, but it may be quite difficult to do so. In the first place, if government attempts the restoration, the result is likely to be more bureaucratic interference and hence damage to civil society. In the second place, churches are among the most important of the intermediate institutions and should lead in the restoration of other institutions and in value maintenance. The difficulty is that if government were to try to cooperate with or assist churches in their efforts, the courts, which have made a mess of the religion clauses of the Constitution, might well intervene to stop the effort.

  In the end, however, all of these threats to the survival of democratic government derive from modern liberalism, which has now turned classical liberalism upside down with respect to both liberty and equality. “Traditional liberalism called for economic freedom within a framework of emotional and expressive restraint. The new liberalism discards expressive restraints but adds economic controls.”16 Rothman adds that the failure of Soviet-style economies has had little impact on this ideology. Nor have the obvious failures of American cultural libertinism and coerced equality had any impact on modern liberalism.

  Modern liberalism, moreover, changes the nature of legislative opinion in the public at large. Decades of government delivery of favors have induced the belief that we are entitled to big government that coddles us. Thus it happens that the same persons who object to the cost of government and the ubiquity of bureaucratic regulation also frequently insist that government deal with still more problems. Much of the public demands of government the very programs whose implementation irritates them. We may, therefore, be creating conditions in which public policy is bound to be perceived as consistently failing. Institutions are thought to be incompetent because they have been assigned tasks in which competence is not possible. The failure to understand that our demands are the source of our dissatisfactions thus generates a public mood that is not favorable to the survival of democratic government.

  Modern liberals will continue to try to govern through the judiciary and the bureaucracies. To the degree they have already succeeded, democratic government has not survived. As the behavior of modern liberal politicians, the courts, and the bureaucrats demonstrates, they have no intention of relinquishing any of their power to the popular will.

  17

  Can America Avoid Gomorrah?

  There is ample room for pessimism, but there may be room for hope as well. Analysis demonstrates that we continue slouching towards Gomorrah. We are well along the road to the moral chaos that is the end of radical individualism and the tyranny that is the goal of radical egalitarianism. Modern liberalism has corrupted our culture across the board.

  The imperative question is whether there is any possibility of avoiding the condition of Gomorrah. What can halt or reverse the march of modern liberalism? What can keep us from reaching a servile condition punctuated by spasms of violence and eroticism?

  The answer, if there is to be an answer, lies in the thought expressed by the French novelist Romain Rolland. He spoke of the pessimism of the intellect, but the optimism of the will. Our trends may not move inexorably to their logical conclusion in squalor. What mistaken, and sometimes ill-intentioned, people have done can perhaps be undone. Americans, having seen what modern liberalism has wrought, seem more likely than they were in the Sixties and early Seventies to mount an effective resistance and restore much of what has been lost. The issue is our will.

  The outlook may seem unpromising when one considers that individualism was the distinctive mark of Western civilization from the beginning. It enabled the West to surpass other civilizations in freedom and wealth. But individualism is valuable only when it is balanced by opposing forces. Now those forces—religion and morality, primarily—have been so weakened that individualism is breaking loose and becoming radical and destructive. Egalitarianism is more difficult to trace. It appears to be the product of envy. While envy is known to all cultures, it has often been held in check by repressive caste systems or social pressures that confine people to particular ranks in society. Individualism releases us from those bonds so that we can make our envy effective.

  We are, furthermore, encumbered, perhaps permanently but certainly for the foreseeable future, with culturally powerful intellectual and artistic classes, who are well to the left of center and who press the culture always in that direction. They attack the existing order and their hostility cannot be placated even by the changes they demand. Appeasement leads only to further attacks. The problem, of course, is not merely the inclination of the intellectual classes, nor even the attitude of courts that increasingly accept nihilism as a constitutional value. Much of the general public must be brought back to the virtues we practiced not long ago. Many Americans, after all, have grown up and lived in a powerfully corrupting culture for thirty years.

  We must, then, take seriously the possibility that perhaps nothing will be done to reverse the direction of our culture, that the degeneracy we see about us will only become worse. The impetus is now with modern liberalism. Writing well before the Sixties revealed the full power and the pathologies of today’s liberalism, Friedrich Hayek said that the decisive objection to any true conservatism is that “by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving…. It has, for this reason, invariably been the fate of conservatism to be dragged along a path not of its own choosing. The tug of war between conservatives and progressives can only affect the speed, not the direction, of contemporary developments.”1 The task of conservatism, so understood, is merely to hold on as long as possible to the institutions and beliefs that liberalism attacks. In the contest between the two, just as in the contest between waves and rocks, there is no doubt which will ultimately prevail. In the 1960s, under the moral assault of modern liberalism, what we had thought to be rocks turned out to be papier-mâché.

  The passive conservatism that Hayek described is characteristic of those Republicans the press loves to describe as “moderates.” As former Senator Malcolm Wallop put it: “If the Democrats were to suggest burning down every building on Capitol Hill, the Republican moderates would say, ‘That’s too radical. Let’s do it one building at a time and stretch it out over three years.’” There is, however, a more aggressive conservatism, or traditionalism, and it is there that our salvation must be found, if it is to be found at all.

  In our time, the opposing forces are ill-named. Conservatism does not merely conserve and liberalism has become illiberal. But the labels are so firmly attached that there is no point in trying to create new ones. We may examine the possibility that liberalism will decline of itself, a victim of its own incoherence, or whether it must be actively attacked and defeated by conservatism.

  There are optimistic suggestions that modern liberalism may die a natural death. Professor Paul Hollander, for example, suggests that political correctness, almost a synonym for modern liberalism, is fading as the Sixties generation ages and begins to pass on to its reward.2 He notes that there are almost no prominent radicals under the age of fifty. There may, however, be an explanation of that fact that is not so cheerful. Radicals whose names we know today achieved celebrity status in the late Sixties and early Seventies by being conspicuously, and usually outrageously, opposed to traditional American values and institutions. Younger radicals today are less likely to achieve celebrity because they run the institutions they formerly tried to burn down. It may not be that radicalism is dying with the Sixties generati
on but that the Sixties generation has so completely triumphed that there are no longer occasions for acts of defiance or destruction that confer celebrity.

  There is also the optimistic view that modern liberalism will fail of itself because it is incoherent as well as intellectually and morally bankrupt. But history teaches that neither intellectual nor moral insolvency necessarily leads to failure. Bankrupt enterprises can survive and do extensive damage for long periods of time, as both the Soviet Union and its spiritual predecessor, the Mongol Empire, demonstrated. The inmates of universities and think tanks are fond of reassuring one another that ideas not only have consequences but are ultimately decisive. That is true but not necessarily consoling. There is no guarantee that the best or most benign ideas will win out.

  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., spoke of the “marketplace of ideas.” As is often the case, an arresting metaphor has paralyzed thought. The winner in that marketplace is not always, or perhaps even usually, the superior product. The economic marketplace penalizes bad decisions. The intellectual and cultural “marketplace”—in which the ideas of politics, the humanities, and most of the social sciences, and popular entertainment are offered—imposes few or no penalties for being wrong, even egregiously wrong. In fact, patently foolish ideas are likely to be regarded as daring. At Yale there was always a sizable minority on the law faculty ready to hire candidates who rejected all the conventional learning in their fields but had nothing to put in their place. It was said of such intellectual adolescents that they had “gone to the frontier.” If only they had. The left-wing intellectual—take John Kenneth Galbraith as the prototype—can go on selling defunct ideas for decades. The forces that put the Edsel out of business do not apply to Harvard professors.

  These somber reflections may seem to suggest that the best strategy for those of us who detest modern liberalism and all its works may be simply to seek sanctuary, to attempt to create small islands of decency and civility in the midst of a subpagan culture. Gated communities and the home-schooling movement are the beginning of such responses—one an attempt to find safety, the other an effort to keep children out of the corrupting embrace of public school systems run by modern liberals. The creation of enclaves to preserve the virtues that the West has so assiduously cultivated, until now, is not a solution to be despised. Thomas Cahill describes how Irish monasteries, on the fringe of civilization, kept alive religion and classical learning during Europe’s Dark Ages:

  [A]t the beginning of the fifth century, no one could foresee the coming collapse. But to reasonable men in the second half of the century, surveying the situation of their time, the end was no longer in doubt: their world was finished. One could do nothing but, like Ausonius [a Roman administrator and poet]. retire to ones villa, write poetry, and await the inevitable. It never occurred to them that the building blocks of their world would be saved by outlandish oddities from a land so marginal that the Romans had not bothered to conquer it…. As Kenneth Clark said, “Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth-century Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time—almost a hundred years—western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea.”3

  The shrine of Skellig Michael (named after St. Michael, and actually seven miles off the coast) consisted of six stone beehive cells and a small oratory.4 The pinnacle’s sheer rock sides and the fierce Atlantic gales made it an uncomfortable and dangerous place for the monks. When the Continent was once more ready for civilization, the Irish reintroduced Christianity and the religious and secular classics their monks had copied.

  For some, it may be possible to view the coming of a new Dark Ages with equanimity. During the worst of the Clarence Thomas hearings, the nominee for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court was subjected to scurrilous and vulgar sexual allegations that were telecast internationally. The shock of seeing how far our governing processes had descended was so great that I went to a friend’s office and said, “Television is showing the end of Western civilization in living color.” He replied, “Of course it’s coming to an end. But don’t worry. It takes a long time, and in the meantime it’s possible to live well.” That is the Ausonian philosophy.

  It is not necessarily true, however, that the collapse will proceed in slow motion. Cultural calamities can happen quickly. The Sixties, for example, were upon us before we knew it. Nor is the prospect of sheltered enclaves entirely consoling. It is possible that we will not be allowed to create islands of freedom and decency. Christianity and learning survived on Skellig Michael and in other monasteries only because the barbarian hordes did not think Ireland worth conquering. Had they done so, Western civilization, if it still deserved that name, would be very different and much poorer in spirit and intellect than it became. In contrast, modern liberals, today’s barbarians, would impose their entertainments, their laws, their regulations, and their court decrees into whatever sanctuaries we may create. One must never underestimate what Richard John Neuhaus called “the profound bigotry and anti-intellectualism and intolerance and illiberality of liberalism.”5 It is an open question, therefore, whether an Ausonian strategy will prove feasible in our time.

  What may be feasible is a moral regeneration and an intellectual understanding capable of defeating modern liberalism. In a discussion of that possibility with friends, we came up with four events that could produce a moral and spiritual regeneration: a religious revival; the revival of public discourse about morality; a cataclysmic war; or a deep economic depression. Though there was increased social discipline during the Second World War and, perhaps even more, during the Great Depression, we may safely drop the last two items on that list as, to say the least, social policies lacking broad public support.

  Perhaps the most promising development in our time is the rise of an energetic, optimistic, and politically sophisticated religious conservatism. It may prove more powerful than merely political or economic conservatism because religious conservatism’s objectives are cultural and moral as well. Thus, though these conservatives can help elect candidates to national and statewide offices, as they have repeatedly demonstrated, their more important influence may lie elsewhere. Because it is a grass roots movement, the new religious conservatism can alter the culture both by electing local officials and school boards (which have greater effects on culture than do national politicians), and by setting a moral tone in opposition to today’s liberal relativism.

  We may be witnessing a religious revival, another awakening. Not only are the evangelicals stronger than ever in their various denominations but other organizations are likely to bring fresh spiritual forces to our culture and, ultimately, to our politics. The Christian Coalition, the Catholic Campaign for America, and the resurgence of interest among the young in Orthodox Judaism are all signs that religion is gaining strength. If so, religious precepts will eventually influence political action.

  Promise Keepers, like earlier religious awakenings that benefited America, adds an emotional fervor to churches that too often lacked it. It may be a crucial question for the culture whether the Roman Church can be restored to its former strength and orthodoxy. Because it is Americas largest denomination, and the only one with strong central authority, the Catholic Church can be a major opponent of the nihilism of modern liberal culture. Pope John Paul II has been attempting to lead an intellectual and spiritual reinvigoration, but there is resistance within the Church. Modern liberal culture has made inroads with some of the hierarchy as well as the laity. It remains to be seen whether intellectual orthodoxy can stand firm against the currents of radical individualism and radical egalitarianism. For the moment, the outcome is in doubt.

  Liberals of the modern variety are hostile to religious conservatism in any denomination. They realize, quite correctly, that it is a threat to their agenda. For that reason, they regularly refer to the “religious right,” u
sing the term as a pejorative to suggest that anything conservative is extreme. No conservative, religious or secular, ought to accept the phrase. There is no symmetry of “left” and “right” in religion, in our culture or in our politics. The Left, as has been apparent throughout our history, and never more so than in the Sixties, is alienated and hostile to American institutions and traditions. They will destroy those institutions and traditions if they can. There is no group of comparable size and influence to balance the extremists of modern liberalism, no “right” that has a similarly destructive program in mind.

  Modern liberals try to frighten Americans by saying that religious conservatives “want to impose their morality on others.” That is palpable foolishness. All participants in politics want to “impose” on others as much of their morality as possible, and no group is more insistent on that than liberals. Religious conservatives are not authoritarian. To the degree they have their way, it will be through democratic processes. The culture would then resemble the better aspects of the 1950s; and that would be cause for rejoicing.

  Religion is, of course, not the only source of morality. The English philosopher Roger Scruton argues that “It would be a great mistake to suppose that religious belief is the only antidote to this [liberal) ideology.”6 That is certainly true. Whether, as Scruton proposes, “piety,” divorced from religion but anchored in an unconscious awareness that customs and traditions embody great wisdom, is sufficient to restore virtue to a degenerate culture is more dubious. Piety in this sense is an aristocratic notion that depends on an unquestioning acceptance of tradition. Once that is lost, however, it would seem impossible to regain. People can hardly be argued into accepting a view unconsciously.