Slouching Towards Gomorrah

P
art I of this book begins with two chapters about the Sixties because that decade brought to a climax trends that had long been developing in America and in other nations of the West. It was a politicized decade, one whose activists saw all of culture and life as political. The consequence is that our culture is now politicized. It worked the other way as well: our politics is increasingly (we need such a word) culturized. We have a new and extremely divisive politics of personal identity. We have invented a range of new or newly savage political-cultural battlegrounds. Democrats and Republicans have begun to line up on opposing sides of the war in the culture.

Because my thesis is that these developments have been coming on for a long time and may be inherent in Western civilization, Part I continues with two chapters that examine the themes of liberty and equality, which were celebrated in the Declaration of Independence and are dominant in our culture today. These ideals have been pressed much too far and account for the cultural devastation wrought by modern liberalism. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the forces that advance the agenda of modern liberalism: the “intellectual” class and that class’s enforcement arm, the judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Part II, consisting of chapters 7 through 15, examines the particular institutions and areas of cultural warfare that result from the
twin thrusts of modern liberalism: radical individualism and radical egalitarianism. This part of the book takes up the collapse of popular culture; the case for censorship; crime, illegitimacy, and welfare; abortion and euthanasia; the politics of sex (radical feminism); the dilemmas of race; the decline of intellect; the trouble in religion; and the fragmentation of our society into warring groups.

Part III consists of two chapters examining the prospects for the survival of democratic government and the question of whether America can reverse its decline and avoid becoming Gomorrah.

O
ne morning on my way to teach a class at the Yale law school, I found on the sidewalk outside the building heaps of smoldering books that had been burned in the law library. They were a small symbol of what was happening on campuses across the nation: violence, destruction of property, mindless hatred of law, authority, and tradition. I stood there, uncomprehending, as a photograph in the next day’s
New York Times
clearly showed. What did they want, these students? What conceivable goals led them to this and to the general havoc they were wreaking on the university? Living in the Sixties, my faculty colleagues and I had no understanding of what it was about, where it came from, or how long the misery would last. It was only much later that a degree of understanding came.

To understand our current plight, we must look back to the tumults of those years, which brought to a crescendo developments in the Fifties and before that most of us had overlooked or misunderstood. We noticed (who could help but notice?) Elvis Presley, rock music, James Dean, the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, Jack Kerouac and the Beats. We did not understand, however, that far from being isolated curiosities, these were harbingers of a new culture that would shortly burst upon us and sweep us into a different country.

The Fifties were the years of Eisenhower’s presidency. Our
domestic world seemed normal and, for the most part, almost placid. The signs were misleading. Politics is a lagging indicator.

Culture eventually makes politics. The cultural seepages of the Fifties strengthened and became a torrent that swept through the nation in the Sixties, only to seem to die away in the Seventies. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the defeat of several of the most liberal senators seemed a reaffirmation of traditional values and proof that the Sixties were dead. They were not. The spirit of the Sixties revived in the Eighties and brought us at last to Bill and Hillary Clinton, the very personifications of the Sixties generation arrived at early middle age with its ideological baggage intact.

This is a book about American decline. Since American culture is a variant of the cultures of all Western industrialized democracies, it may even, inadvertently, be a book about Western decline. In the United States, at least, that decline and the mounting resistance to it have produced what we now call a culture war. It is impossible to say what the outcome will be, but for the moment our trajectory continues downward. This is not to deny that much in our culture remains healthy, that many families are intact and continue to raise children with strong moral values. American culture is complex and resilient. But it is also not to be denied that there are aspects of almost every branch of our culture that are worse than ever before and that the rot is spreading.

“Culture,” as used here, refers to all human behavior and institutions, including popular entertainment, art, religion, education, scholarship, economic activity, science, technology, law, and morality. Of that list, only science, technology, and the economy may be said to be healthy today, and it is problematical how long that will last. Improbable as it may seem, science and technology themselves are increasingly under attack, and it seems highly unlikely that a vigorous economy can be sustained in an enfeebled, hedonistic culture, particularly when that culture distorts incentives by increasingly rejecting personal achievement as the criterion for the distribution of rewards.

With each new evidence of deterioration, we lament for a moment, and then become accustomed to it. We hear one day of the latest rap song calling for killing policemen or the sexual mutilation of women; the next, of coercive left-wing political indoctrination at a prestigious university; then of the latest homicide figures for New York City, Los Angeles, or the District
of Columbia; of the collapse of the criminal justice system, which displays an inability to punish adequately and, often enough, an inability even to convict the clearly guilty; of the rising rate of illegitimate births; the uninhibited display of sexuality and the popularization of violence in our entertainment; worsening racial tensions; the angry activists of feminism, homosexuality, environmentalism, animal rights…the list could be extended almost indefinitely.

So unrelenting is the assault on our sensibilities that many of us grow numb, finding resignation to be the rational, adaptive response to an environment that is increasingly polluted and apparently beyond our control. That is what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan calls “defining deviancy down.”
¹
Moynihan cites the “Durkheim constant.”
²
Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology, posited that there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior any community can “afford to recognize.”
³
As behavior worsens, the community adjusts its standards so that conduct once thought reprehensible is no longer deemed so. As behavior improves, the deviancy boundary moves up to encompass conduct previously thought normal. Thus, a community of saints and a community of felons would display very different behavior but about the same amount of recognized deviancy.

But the Durkheim constant is now behaving in a very odd way. While defining deviancy down with respect to crime, illegitimacy, drug use, and the like, our cultural elites are growing intensely moralistic and disapproving about what had always been thought normal behavior, thus accomplishing what columnist Charles Krauthammer terms “defining deviancy up.”
⁴
It is at least an apparent paradox that we are accomplishing both forms of redefining, both down and up, simultaneously. One would suppose that as once normal behavior became viewed as deviant, that would mean that there was less really bad conduct in the society. But that is hardly our case. Instead, we have redefined what we mean by such things as child abuse, rape, and racial or sexual discrimination so that behavior until recently thought quite normal, unremarkable, even benign, is now identified as blameworthy or even criminal. Middle-class life is portrayed as oppressive and shot through with pathologies. “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling,” Krauthammer wrote, “it is not enough for the
deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant.”
⁵
This situation is thoroughly perverse. Underclass values become increasingly acceptable to the middle class, especially their young, and middle-class values become increasingly contemptible to the cultural elites.