Robert Bork, “Slouching Towards Gomorrah” has been completed and very much enjoyed. On one level, it is a much easier to read version of “Closing of the American Mind”, but one should never forgo that difficult but worthwhile classic for this book. “Gomorrah” stands on it’s own as a sweeping indictment of modern liberalism by a man that ought to have been Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but instead became a symbol for the ACTUAL politics of personal destruction, as his name became a verb.
The key points are simple. Modern liberalism has two defining objectives:
- Radical egalitarianism – meaning the forced equality of outcomes rather than the equality of opportunities. Since neither humans nor anything in nature are oriented to equality of outcome (a bell shaped curve would be a more natural distribution), the “liberal” is forced to bow to the authoritarian impulse to achieve this objective.
- Radical individualism – the removal of limits to personal gratification. From this comes the liberal moral code … “if it feels good do it”. Since this is no code, the liberal must destroy culture, as culture is largely a values exercise in some behavior having more value than other behavior.
There would seem to be tension between these objectives, but “consistency is not an issue” allows the liberal to at least abstractly have their cake and eat it too. The egalitarian principle is called forth in areas where differential reward would be provided for differential achievement. Wages, quotas, tenure decisions, etc. Radical individualism comes into play on the personal front where nothing should stand in an individual’s way in self gratification … often in the areas of sexuality or the arts.
A lot of discussion about the origins of liberal thought centered around John Stuart Mill’s “One very simple principle”: “the sole end of which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection … The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute.”
At the time Mill wrote this little gem, he likely never really considered the idea of Godless man, seeking to be his own God of personal pleasure, but this is where we find ourselves today, “in the suburbs of
If the point of “far enough” is ever reached (and there is very scant evidence that it ever would be), then the enterprise of liberalism would be satiated. There is however, no reason to “be concerned” that would happen … homosexual marriage for example will not be the end. It has never been tried in any culture for thousands of years, but that makes no matter, the liberal elite is intent that it be tried in this country, and since their impulses are anti-democratic, the most likely route is through the courts.
Bjork's view is that we are headed to "downtown Sodom and Gomorrah" ... and we all know how that ended!
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