Slouching Towards Gomorrah (3 page)

Demands for greater or complete equality seem to have other sources. Boredom plays a role here as well. It is impossible, for example, to observe radical feminists without thinking that their assertions of oppression and victimization, their never-ending search for fresh grievances, are ways of giving meaning to lives that would otherwise seem sterile to them. Self-pity and envy are also undoubtedly factors, as are the prestige and financial support to be had from pressing their claims, but I tend to think that the search for meaning plays a prominent and perhaps predominant role in many forms of radical egalitarianism.

A crucial factor in the creation of liberalism and its gradual transformation into modern liberalism has yet to be mentioned: the rise of intellectual and artistic classes independent of patrons toward the close of the eighteenth century and their subsequent growth in size and prestige. For reasons to be canvassed in chapter 5, these classes tend to be hostile to traditional culture and to the bourgeois state. They powerfully reinforce and mobilize the forces pressing towards radical individualism and radical egalitarianism.

The fact that resistance to modern liberalism is weakening suggests 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. Government grows larger and more intrusive in order to direct the distribution of goods and services in an ever more equal fashion while people are coarsened and diverted, led to believe that their freedoms are increasing, by a great variety of entertainments featuring violence and sex.

Having spoken of liberty and equality (in their modern, radical forms), it is time to complete the triad by mentioning fraternity. It is no mere rhetorical device to use the slogan of the French Revolution, for liberty, equality, and fraternity are enduring aspirations, and dilemmas, of humans in society. The desire for fraternity or community is inevitable in a social animal, but that desire is condemned to frustration, to be a wistful hope, anywhere modern liberalism holds sway. Radical individualism, radical egalitarianism, omnipresent and omni-incompetent government, the politicization of the culture, and the battle for advantages through politics shatter a society into fragments of isolated individuals and angry groups. Social peace and cohesion decline as loneliness and alienation rise. Life in such a culture can come close to seeming intolerable.

A fragmented society, one in which a sense of community has disappeared, is necessarily a society with low morale. It displays loss of nerve, which means that it cannot summon the will to suppress public obscenity, punish crime, reform welfare, attach stigma to the bearing of illegitimate children, resist the demands of self-proclaimed victim groups for preferential treatment, or maintain standards of reason and scholarship. That is precisely and increasingly our situation today.

Perversely, modern liberals seek to cure the disease of a politicized culture with the medicine of more politics. More politics means more clashes between interest groups, more anger and division, and more moral assaults upon opponents. The great danger, of course, is that eventually a collectivist solution will be adopted to control social turbulence. Turbulence is not limited to political and cultural warfare; it is increasingly a phenomenon of violence in streets and neighborhoods. If society should reach a chaotic condition of warring groups and individual alienation, a condition
in which even personal security is problematic for a majority of its people, authoritarian government may be accepted. Worse, a movement with transcendental principles, not necessarily benign ones, may promise community and ultimately exact a fearful cost.

The encroachments of liberalism upon traditional ways of thinking and acting have created not just a battle here and a skirmish there but a conflict across the entire culture. This is different in kind from the usual piecemeal revisions we have seen in the past. “Now and then,” according to literary scholar Lionel Trilling, “it is possible to observe the moral life in the process of revising itself, perhaps by reducing the emphasis it formerly placed upon one or another of its elements, perhaps by inventing and adding to itself a new element, some mode of conduct or of feeling which hitherto it had not regarded as essential to virtue.”
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A nations moral life is, of course, the foundation of its culture. When Trilling’s words were published in 1970, though he had seen the convulsions of the Sixties, he could not have imagined the scope and depth of the “revisions” yet to come. What we experience now is not the subtraction or addition of one or another of the elements of our moral life, but an assault that aims at, and largely accomplishes, sweeping changes across the entire cultural landscape. Large chunks of the moral life of the United States, major features of its culture, have disappeared altogether, and more are in the process of extinction. These are being, or have already been, replaced by new modes of conduct, ways of thought, and standards of morality that are unwelcome to many of us.

Trilling went on: “The news of such an event [a revision in moral life] is often received with a degree of irony or some other sign of resistance.”
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Given the comprehensive scope of the changes in our moral-cultural life, it is not surprising that signs of resistance, though late in appearing, are becoming equally widespread and vigorous. The addition or subtraction of a single virtue may provoke only a degree of irony, but when the changes are across the board, the thrust and the resistance add up to a major conflict. Irony there is in plentiful supply, but also anger, and even a continuing realignment of our political parties along cultural lines. In the future, our political contests will also be cultural struggles.

This book will examine the changes wrought by liberalism in a variety of seemingly disparate areas of life, from popular entertainment
to religion to scholarship to constitutional law, from abortion to crime to feminism, and more. It will attempt to answer where modern liberalism came from and why its ideas are pressed so immoderately. Are cultural trends cyclical or is this trend inherent in Western civilization, or even, perhaps, in human nature itself? There is a case for one of the latter answers, and if that argument is correct, the future is probably bleak. No one can be certain of that, however. Cultures in decline have, unpredictably, turned themselves around before. Perhaps ours will too.

I begin with the theory and the practice of the decade of the Sixties, the decade not only of burning law books but of revolutionary nihilism, occupied and terrorized universities, and the Establishment’s surrender. The Sixties may be seen in the universities as a mini-French Revolution that seemed to fail, but ultimately did not. The radicals were not defeated by a conservative or traditionally liberal opposition but by their own graduation from the universities. And theirs was merely a temporary defeat. They and their ideology are all around us now. That is the reason for understanding the Sixties.

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t is important to understand what the Sixties turmoil was about, for the youth culture that became manifest then is the modern liberal culture of today. Where that culture will take us next may be impossible to say, but it is also impossible even to make an informed guess without understanding the forces let loose by the decade that changed America.

Many people attribute the student frenzy, civil disobedience, and violence of the Sixties to the war in Vietnam. That is a comforting thought, for, if true, it would mean that the Sixties pivoted on a single ephemeral issue rather than representing a major, and perhaps permanent, upheaval across all of American culture. Unfortunately, the evidence seems clear that Vietnam was more an occasion for the outbreaks than their cause. The war at most intensified into hatred a contempt for American civilization that was already in place.

During the same period, other countries that had no involvement in the Vietnamese war, notably France, Italy, and Germany, saw serious student rebellions. In France the students came closer to toppling the government than the radicals ever did in the United States. The turmoil seems to have had more to do with attitudes that reached their culmination in a particular
generation in Western democracies than with the war.

Contrast the reaction of American youth to the wars in Korea and in Vietnam. Both were wars in Asia, both exacted high prices in Americans killed or disabled, both had only the rationale of containing communism, both soon became unpopular. Yet American youth went willingly, if not gladly, to Korea, while they demonstrated against Vietnam, marched on the Pentagon, threw blood on draft records, fled to Canada and Sweden, and denounced “Amerika.” Something in our culture, or at least the culture of our youth, had changed between the two wars. Vietnam was a convenient and powerful metaphor for what was in reality the belief that America’s culture, society, economy, and polity were corrupt.

One must not, of course, discount the great reservoir of self-interest that underlay much of the rhetoric of morality. The generation that fought in Korea had not grown up with affluence. Many had served in World War II or grew up during the war. The middle-class youths who were asked to fight in Vietnam were of a pampered generation, one that prized personal convenience above almost all else. The prospect that their comfortable lives might be disrupted, or even endangered, by having to serve their country in Vietnam was for many intolerable. Thus, the student protests wound down when the draft ended.

Yet to this day, many contend that the radicals’ protests against the war were honorable. Professor James Miller of the New School for Social Research, for example, argues that there were substantial benefits from the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention because of the “dissent, confrontation, the passionate expression of moral outrage at a war that was, after all, morally reprehensible and unjust in its brutality, as well as strategically mistaken.”
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Those who speak in this fashion, and there are many, realize that something is still at stake in the argument over Vietnam. Indeed there is. The debate about that war is a contest between two opposed ways of viewing the world, whose current form is the war in the culture. That makes Vietnam worth a word or two.