There is, of course, a secular language of morality, but it is self-conscious rather than unaware. While hoping for a religious reawakening, we had best also speak the language of secular morality to a society that has become largely secular. The language of secular morality is spoken increasingly by conservative commentators in the press and on talk radio. That language takes the form of ridiculing the idiocies of modern liberalism and extolling traditional values. Talk radio, in particular, provides a way to reach the public by bypassing the print press and television, which remain overwhelmingly liberal. The effectiveness of talk radio may be gauged by the hysteria it generates in the liberal press and among liberal politicians.
We need not decide here whether secular morality is merely the dwindling moral capital of religious belief that has faded. C. S. Lewis made the argument that ethics or morality precedes religion. But in that case there would be little social value to religion; secular ethics would be sufficient to maintain a society’s virtue. The evidence is running rather strongly against that point of view. Perhaps a society—at least a Western society in which Christianity had been dominant—cannot retain its virtue when religion has lapsed.
One indication that morality, secular or religious, still retains strength is that our politics are becoming increasingly, if erratically and inconsistently, conservative. Our two political parties are increasingly polarized on cultural issues and the Republican electoral victory of 1994 surely reflected dissatisfaction with the degenerate culture liberals have made. Bill Clintons subsequent adoption of Republican rhetoric and policies as his own, however insincere, is another sign that a conservative cultural as well as political revival is probably underway. It is quite possible, however, that the party of cultural conservatism will be defeated by the public appetite for the welfare state. The electorate balks at conservative programs that would deprive them of the slightest amount of the entitlements and benefits they now enjoy. Campaigns and elections are crucial, nevertheless, precisely because our parties have, by and large, lined up on opposite sides of the cultural divide. Elections are important not only because of the policies adopted and laws enacted but as symbolic victories for one set of values or the other.
But it is well to remember the limits of politics. The political nation is not the same as the cultural nation; the two have different leaders and very different views of the world. Even when conservative political leaders have the votes, liberal cultural leaders operate and exercise influence where votes do not count. However many political victories conservatives may produce, they cannot attack modern liberalism in its fortresses. If conservatives come to control the White House and both Houses of Congress, there will be very little change in Hollywood, the network evening news, universities, church bureaucracies, the New York Times, or the Washington Post. Institutions that are overwhelmingly left-liberal (89 percent of journalists voted for Bill Clinton in 1992) will continue to misinform the public and distort public discourse. The obscenities of popular entertainment will often be protected by the courts. The tyrannies of political correctness and multiculturalism will not be ejected from the universities by any number of conservative victories at the polls. Modern liberals captured the government and its bureaucracies because they captured the culture. Conservative political victories will always be tenuous and fragile unless conservatives recapture the culture.
The election of Ronald Reagan and the defeat of a clutch of very liberal Democratic senators in 1980 seemed to many of us a decisive turn for the better in our culture. The “Reagan Revolution” was to be a sharp break with liberal trends. Liberals thought otherwise. If their response to the 1980 elections is any guide, in reaction to future conservative victories at the polls, modern liberals will only become more intolerant, untruthful, venomous, and abusive. The cultural phase of the revolution petered out; Reagan lost the Senate in 1986 and was followed by Bush and Clinton. Today, more is wrong with our culture than was the case in 1980. If the conservative political revival persists and gathers strength, we may see a long period of an antagonistic standoff between the political nation and its culture, on the one hand, and the culture of the elites, on the other.
Victory over modern liberalism will require a robust self-confidence about the worth of traditional values that the relativism of modern liberalism has already seriously damaged. When the barbarians struck in the Sixties, America did not show confidence in its own worth and values. We were taken by surprise, but we have had time to recover and form a new center that just may hold. Now that we have seen the emptiness of the liberal criticism of America, now that we have seen the catastrophes that the ideas of modern liberalism have produced and are producing, perhaps we will shed our guilt and forthrightly speak and act on the understanding that the evolution of traditional values will produce a far better society than the nihilism of the Left.
This is at bottom a moral and spiritual struggle. Speaking of the high rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and drug abuse, and of the lewdness, cruelty, and senseless violence with which we have become familiar, James Q. Wilson says there are many causes and one must resist the temptation to blame them all on moral failure. But he then places a large part of the blame precisely on moral failure:
These unpleasant actions are chiefly the behavior of young people who in all cultures in every epoch test the limits of acceptable behavior. Testing limits is a way of asserting selfhood. Maintaining limits is a way of asserting community. If the limits are asserted weakly, uncertainly, or apologetically, their effects must surely be weaker than if they are asserted boldly, confidently, and persuasively. How vigorously and persuasively we—mostly but not entirely older people—assert those limits will surely depend to some important degree on how confidently we believe in the sentiments that underlie them. Some of us have lost that confidence. The avant-garde in music, art, and literature mocks that confidence.7
In a word, everything ultimately depends on the temper of the American people. That temper is uncertain. There may be reason to think that a major portion of the American public has changed its values over the past thirty years, and that much of the public is no longer concerned with issues of personal morality and responsibility. The evidence frequently offered is the President of the United States. William Jefferson Clinton is the very model of the modern liberal. He epitomizes the leading edge of the trends this book has discussed. The London Spectator, shortly after the 1992 presidential election, saw the election result as representing a moral and cultural sea change in the United States:
The election of Governor Bill Clinton is nothing less than a cultural revolution…. [Americans] have chosen a youngish man, with little experience beyond the parochial politics of Arkansas, dogged by accusations of indiscriminate marital infidelity, and with no record of military service (to put it politely) to embody the aspirations and values of the nation…. [T]his suggests that the America of the Baby Boomers is a radically different place from the America-of their parents….
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a large part of the American people have turned their backs on that old-fashioned quality: Virtue—private and public Virtue.8
Because it did not allow for the unpalatability of the alternatives American voters had—the feckless George Bush and the unstable Ross Perot—the Spectator may have been somewhat too hard on us. Still, thirty years ago, Clinton’s behavior would have been absolutely disqualifying. Since the 1992 election, the public has learned far more about what is known, euphemistically, as the “character issue.” The additional information abundantly confirms the Spectators judgment about the man in both his private and public lives and adds new charges to a list that is already lengthy. Yet, none of this appears to affect Clintons popularity. It is difficult not to conclude that something about our moral perceptions and reactions has changed profoundly. If that change is permanent, the implications for our future are bleak.
It would be wrong, however, to make confident predictions about the future. American culture is h
ighly complex, diverse, and resilient. To criticize the decadence and nihilism that are growing apace in America is not to deny that the nation still contains much that is good and healthy.
All that is true. I have been describing trends, not making an overall assessment of our culture, but it is also true that the trends have been running the wrong way, dramatically so in the past thirty years. It would be difficult to contend that, the end of racial segregation aside, American culture today is as healthy as the culture of the 1950s. Country singer and social philosopher Merle Haggard says that the decade of the Sixties “was just the evening of it all. I think we’re into the dead of night now.”9 If the trends of modern liberalism continue, the dead of night still lies ahead.
If there are signs that we have become less concerned than we should be with virtue, there are also signs that many 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, what we probably face is an increasingly vulgar, violent, chaotic, and politicized culture. Our hopes, our struggles, and our optimism must be for the long run. The first requisite is knowing what is happening to us. This book has tried to answer that, to show that decline runs across our entire culture and that it has a common cause, modern liberalism.
The second step is resistance to radical individualism and radical egalitarianism in every area of culture. 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. When, for example, black churches try to save the youth of the inner city, the financial and moral support for that effort must be private. Government is largely responsible for making the inner cities what they are. Perhaps government can stop doing harm by reforming welfare, but it should leave to private institutions the task of redeeming the culture.
I end where I began, contemplating burnt books. Though I did not suspect it then, the charred law books on the sidewalk in New Haven were a metaphor, a symbol of the coming torching of America’s intellectual and moral capital by the barbarians of modern liberalism. We have allowed that capital to be severely damaged, but perhaps not beyond repair. As we approach its desolate and sordid precincts, the pessimism of the intellect tells us that Gomorrah is our probable destination. What is left to us is a determination not to accept that fate and the courage to resist it—the optimism of the will.
Afterword: The Olympians
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us….
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Lear
The slaughters of September 11, 2001, we are frequently told, changed America forever: a culture that had grown soft and hedonistic recovered its coherence and moral clarity. The attacks did provoke an outburst of patriotism, and the men of the New York City fire and police departments, putting duty before their own lives, behaved heroically. But the conclusion that our culture as a whole has recovered from its long decline is more dubious. Despite the threat from radical Islam, despite the patriotism of most Americans, America’s culture faces a continuing assault from within. What long-run effects that will have upon our cohesion and morale remain to be seen.
Modern liberalism, which I have argued is the source of our cultural travails, is a state of mind and spirit aptly described by Kenneth Minogue: “We may call it Olympianism because it is the project of an intellectual elite that believes that it enjoys superior enlightenment and that its business is to spread this benefit to those living on the lower slopes of human achievement…. Olympianism burrowed like a parasite into the most powerful institution of the emerging knowledge economy—the universities.“1 Olympians are verbalists, distinguished less by their intellectual prowess than by the uniformity of their antibourgeois attitudes, Utopian musings, and authoritarian temper. If those of us on the lower slopes do not recognize the superiority of the Olympians’ attitudes, we must by coercion, hard or soft as the circumstances may warrant, be brought to their point of view.
This afterword discusses where modern liberalism (or Olympianism) has brought us in the seven years since this book was first published, with special attention to the areas of pornography and censorship, race relations, the homosexual movement, the incipient internationalization of our Constitution, and, throughout, the relentless erosion of American moral values. The American Supreme Court, it will be seen, is the chosen instrument of aggressive Olympianism. Tethered neither by the Constitution, nor by the desires of the American people, nor by understanding of the ways in which a society works, the Court has been, and for the foreseeable future seems certain to remain, the primary shaper of public policy about culture and morality. Because law inevitably has an educational effect, the Court reshapes public views of moral and cultural issues. Both the Court and the Olympian culture to which it responds are hostile to limits on hedonistic individualism, the expression of sexual morality through law, rewards according to achievement rather than group identity, and traditional Western religions.
CENSORSHIP: THE DISPARATE TREATMENT OF
OBSCENITY, PORNOGRAPHY, VULGARITY, AND IDEAS
In chapter 8, I argued for a revival of censorship to suppress “the most violent and sexually explicit material now on offer, starting with the obscene prose and pictures available on the Internet, motion pictures that are mere rhapsodies to violence, and the more degenerate lyrics of rap music.” That case, viewed in isolation, is even stronger now. Much of popular entertainment has sunk even lower. There is no need to rehearse once more the effects of such programming on our culture, or the near impossibility of watching many shows with any degree of comfort. If that were all censorship would reach, the case for it would seem conclusive. The difficulty, which complicates the case, is that censorship is being captured by the Left. One of the first and most important tactics of Olympians is to silence dissent. Pornography, obscenity, gratuitous depictions of carnage, and the grossest forms of vulgarity will not be censored, given today’s Supreme Court, but conservative and traditional ideas and attitudes, which are anathema to modern liberals, may well be. That is taking place today, and it would be foolish to endorse a weapon that, at least in today’s circumstances, will fail to curtail depravity but will be turned against conservative political and cultural expression.
The Supreme Court, in the name of the First Amendment, has made it abundantly clear that legislatures will not be permitted to ban pornography or even obscenity. In this area, the Court is not defining the limits of the “freedom of speech” so much as it is obliterating them.
The themes the Court has been developing reached a crescendo of sorts in United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group, Inc. (2000),2 which held unconstitutional a congressional statute requiring cable television channels “primarily dedicated to sexually-oriented programming” to limit their transmission to hours when children are unlikely to be viewing. The Court majority found the law a restriction on the content of speech that was not justified because there appeared to be less restrictive methods of protecting children.
The Justices, once more equating sex and speech, said that “Basic speech principles are at stake in this case. “That was a peculiar view, not to say an eccentric one, since Playboy advertised, as Justice Scalia pointed out in dissent, that its channel featured such inspiring materials as “female masturbation/external,” “girl/girl sex,” and “oral sex/cunnilingus.” Most of the �
�speech” in such entertainments probably consisted of simulated moans of ecstasy, which the females are required to utter in order to excite viewers. The legislation focused on the danger that children would be exposed to erotic sounds or pictures. The Court, on the other hand, true to the tenets of radical individualism, gave little weight to the well-being of children and none to the interest of society in preserving some vestige of a moral tone, but was concerned only to protect the salacious pleasures of adults. “Where the designed benefit of a content-based speech restriction is to shield the sensibilities of listeners, the general rule is that the right of expression prevails, even where no less restrictive alternative exists. We are expected to protect our own sensibilities ‘simply by averting [our] eyes.’” Many of the people around us will not avert their eyes, and that fact will certainly produce a moral and aesthetic environment which it is impossible to ignore. We are forced to live in an increasingly ugly society.
Indeed, the Court majority refuted its own avert-your-eyes solution by stressing the social value of even the most depraved versions of “speech”: “It is through speech that our convictions and beliefs are influenced, expressed, and tested. It is through speech that we bring those beliefs to bear on Government and society. It is through speech that our personalities are formed and expressed.” Try substituting “watching female masturbation/external” or “viewing oral sex/cunnilingus” for the word “speech” in that passage and see how persuasive it remains.
Slouching Towards Gomorrah Page 40