Status
Call number
Description
In this New York Times bestselling book, Robert H. Bork, our country's most distinguished conservative scholar, offers a prophetic and unprecedented view of a culture in decline, a nation in such serious moral trouble that its very foundation is crumbling: a nation that slouches not towards the Bethlehem envisioned by the poet Yeats in 1919, but towards Gomorrah. Slouching Towards Gomorrah is a penetrating, devastatingly insightful exposé of a country in crisis at the end of the millennium, where the rise of modern liberalism, which stresses the dual forces of radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than opportunities) and radical individualism (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification), has undermined our culture, our intellect, and our morality. In a new Afterword, the author highlights recent disturbing trends in our laws and society, with special attention to matters of sex and censorship, race relations, and the relentless erosion of American moral values. The alarm he sounds is more sobering than ever: we can accept our fate and try to insulate ourselves from the effects of a degenerating culture, or we can choose to halt the beast, to oppose modern liberalism in every arena. The will to resist, he warns, remains our only hope.… (more)
Publication
Similar in this library
ISBN
Collection
Language
Original language
Original publication date
User reviews
Society’s degradation has been caused by radical egalitarianism, radical feminism, popular culture, the Supreme Court, and rock n’ roll music (which he admits never having listened to). Portable radios share much blame for they permitted youth to listen to music without parental supervision. The Internet (which he admits to never having looked at) is a quagmire of dirty pictures, political correctness, and Afro centrists. He leaves virtually no one unscathed, attacking both the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant denominations that are living in a “leftist dream world,” and have become feminized.
Bork’s solution to this state of affairs is censorship, democratization of the Supreme Court, and religion - where this religion is to be found among today’s debased denominations her does not say
The problem with this book is that it’s all assault and no finesse. Never does he engage the reader in a discussion of both sides of an issue. He creates a straw man and then knocks it over. He falls into the trap he accuses liberals of falling into; “assaulting one’s opponents as not merely wrong but morally evil.” He confuses cause with symptoms. Never does he reveal evidence as to how the Beatles cause immoral behavior. He states simply, “Rock and rap are utterly impoverished by comparison with swing or jazz or any pre-World War II music personally, I always thought swing was the epitome of decadence] impoverished emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually.”
Bork cannot resist name-calling. Liberals are fascist, totalitarian, and Nazi-like. Multiculturalism “is barbarism,” “feminist ideology is a fantasy of persecution.” He castigates those “cafeteria Catholics” who subscribe only to those elements of Catholicism with which they agree and then he proceeds to rebuke the Catholic Church’s call for a “just wage”, calling it “misunderstood economics.” Not an American institution escapes Bork’s wrath: the universities, colleges, government, the arts, the churches and the press have all been indoctrinated by liberals (that must be why we've elected so many Republicans in the last 25 years.)
For a self-defined conservative, Bork has some radical ideas. He would overturn the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions to be overridden by a majority vote of the Congress. He does not explain how, for example, if popular culture and society are so debased, a legislature elected by those debased people will fix Supreme Court decisions. It seems to me the whole purpose of the Supreme Court being immune to public pressure (as Franklin Roosevelt discovered to his dismay) is to provide a conservative brake on society, to constrain the short-lived stimulus of fleeting majorities. He is against an activist court. Not just liberal activism, but conservative as well, suggesting at one point that it all began with the conservative court that wrote into the constitution all sorts of free market principles that are not there. The liberals then just continued this process of activism but from a cultural perspective.
Bork is the perfect example of the circular nature of ideology, moving from far left to far right where they merge to become equally authoritarian. And what do you bet, he visited adult bookstores.