NLA REVIEW	A Culture Indicted	Spring 1997

Denied a seat on the Supreme Court, Robert Bork has used his free time to diagnose the ills of American society. But has he overlooked the best hopes for revival?

But seen in longer perspective, Bork's defeat may have been providential. As a justice of the high court, he might never have had the time, or indeed the freedom, to have written this major testament, Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Already reviews of the book are reviving the ad hominem attacks organized against Bork in 1987. Richard A. Epstein, in the New York Times for October 20, depicts Bork as an embittered, almost manic, Lear—"all passion and no balance." But it is precisely balance and steely, unimpassioned logic which characterize Bork's book, each of its seventeen chapters being a carefully constructed argument with detailed factual support.

At the outset, Bork, in Part I of Slouching Towards Gomorrah, examines the historical development of liberal conceptions of individualism and egalitarianism in American society. He sees these conceptions, in the now radical and absolutist forms invented by a liberal elite, and imposed by the Supreme Court, as destructive of our society's traditional morality. He decries the dominant egalitarian who "resents any distinction among people or forms of behavior that suggests superiority in one or the other." This, of course, means that no cultural or moral view can be deemed superior to any other, the result being the moral chaos we now experience. It also means that the state must be installed as the enforcer of equality.

Bork concludes that "we are on the road to cultural disaster because, in their final stages, radical egalitarianism becomes tyranny and radical individualism descends into hedonism. Those translate into a modern version of bread and circuses."

Finding the ultimate roots of all of this in the thinkers of the Enlightenment and, more latterly, in the work of John Stuart Mill and in prevalent readings of the Declaration of Independence, he sees the proximate origin of the problem in the student radicalism of the 1960s, with its "dreams of revolution and the destruction of institutions." Entering universities in unprecedented numbers, these largely affluent and immature youths came under the influence of leftist professors, leftist media influences, and leftist entertainment figures—many of whom promoted violence and hatred of the United States, of the West, and of traditional morality.

Radical politics gave not only an outlet to the energies of revolt but gave that revolt a form as a "substitute for religion," intended to affect the governance of the nation. This substitute religion did not die out. Its spirit "has brought us at last to Bill and Hillary Clinton, the very personifications of the Sixties generation arrived at middle age with its ideological baggage intact." The possessors of the baggage are not only the Clintons; more importantly they are the intellectual class, and the media especially.

Bork indicts the Supreme Court as the supreme agent of modem liberalism, and he brings us to see the "crisis of legitimacy" brought about by the Court. As Bork points out, trapped by the Court's assumption that it is "a legislature beyond the reach of the ballot box," the nation has no practical means of protecting itself against outrages solemnly pronounced as "law" by the Court.

If Part I of the book is thus an indictment of the culture and its managers, a second section of nine chapters is a bill of particulars. Bork reviews in explicit detail the pornography, violence, and vile language of mass entertainment in the media, television sleaze (e.g., the Montel Williams show, "Michael Jackson's crotch-clutching performance at the Super Bowl"), perverse art, and the major financial sponsorship of it all. He finds free-market principles inadequate to protect society and makes a reasoned case for forms of censorship. He points to the rise of crime, illegitimacy and welfare, and fears "we may have to go on much as we have, at least until the welfare state collapses and society is engulfed in a hurricane of violence." Along similar lines, he speaks of abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia, rightly calling them "killing for convenience." He turns to the foibles and evils of radical feminism, "the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the Sixties." He speaks likewise of those aspects of our policies on race—in particular, affirmative action, which he sees as "destroying what America means, changing us from a society whose rewards may be achieved by individual merit to one whose rewards are handed out according to group identity."

Does Bork leave us with no hope? He finds all to fear and nothing to hope for in our public schools and institutions of higher learning, pointing to the great loss of literacy and the general abandonment of reason. As to the churches, he is concerned over the diluting effect that radical individualism is now inflicting upon religious conviction and practice—noting the legion of "cafeteria Catholics" and the widespread emergence of New Age religions.

Slouching Towards Gomorrah isnot quite a cry of despair. But as Bork asks "Can America avoid Gomorrah?" he offers but few hints of hope. He says we need a moral and spiritual regeneration and that the most promising development in sight is in politically sophisticated religious conservatism.

After 343 pages of rightly deploring our moral decline and telling us that there's going to be hell to pay in America's coming years, that's where Bork leaves us, needlessly. There are at least two great bases for hope in America. The first is the rising generation of orthodox Catholics, orthodox Evangelicals, and orthodox Jews. I have encountered ever so many such young people in my seminars at the Dickinson Law School, in the pro-life movement, on the campuses of our five or six still-Catholic colleges, and at schools like Liberty University. Nationally, we will soon feel the impact of these youngsters, who are determined to stage a counter-march against the move toward Gomorrah.

The other great force, now strongly operative in our society, is—yes—that of prayer. Bork does not allude to that reality, but I do not criticize his omission (any more than I do his omission of John Paul II's Veritas Splendor, our age's most profound statement on the moral order and law). Rather, I see Slouching Towards Gomorrah as his providing a very informative premise to spiritual conclusions crying to be stated. Is it too much to hope that Bork will now address these conclusions? The book he would write next might be called Striding Towards Emmaus.