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How We Got Here From There
Robert H. Bork
Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline
I remember watching an episode of Donahue in which one of the guests, talking about the problem of teenage sex, suggested we ought to teach our kids that they shouldn't have sex, period, until they're married. Donahue treated this suggestion with utter scorn, saying, "You can't stop kids from having sex."
This was such a stupid statement that I marveled that even Phil Donahue could say it. Didn't he grow up in the 1940s or 1950s, as I did? The fact is that we did stop, not all, but most kids from having sex. Think about it. This was before the pill, condoms had to be asked for in the drugstore, and abortions were very hard to get (compared to now). Yet the number of illegitimate births was a tiny fraction of what we have today. The only explanation I can think of is that fewer kids were having sex then than now, so apparently society can stop kids from having sex. The only difference today is the sexual revolution of the 1960s, in which we started telling kids that it was OK to have sex outside of marriage.
Well, get a clue, folks. It's not OK to have sex outside of marriage. The old rules weren't arbitrary at all. For children born outside of marriage are penalized even if we don't call them bastards anymore. They are far likelier to grow up in poverty. They are likelier to be unloved. They are likelier to be undisciplined, hostile, aggressive, angry, violent — and to be single parents in turn.
Where are all the advantages we were supposed to get from ending "sexual repression"? We were supposed to find ourselves miraculously healed of many ills; instead, we are sicker by far. Apparently, sexual repression was actually a pretty good thing, judging from the results of getting rid of it. And even today, I don't know of many people who don't want their spouses to choose sexual repression if free expression means having affairs. The fact is that sexual self- restraint is part of what it means to be civilized, and by throwing away that principle all we've achieved is barbarism.
Which brings me to Bork's book. Robert Bork is what even his most vicious opponents during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings had to admit: a brilliant analytical mind. In fact, I think what they hated most about him was not that he disagreed with them, but that the person disagreeing with them was clearly smarter than they were. But there's no particular arrogance in Bork's book (unlike, say, Cronkite's self-praising memoir). Instead, Bork lays out, clearly, step by step, how we got to where we are from the pretty decent society we had in the 1950s. In every case of cultural decline, our intellectual elites persuaded us as a people to do the very things that the rules of our civilization had tried to restrain us from doing, and the result was a shuddering collapse of many areas of our culture. Bork documents it, but more to the point, anybody who lived through it will know that it's true. Those of us who have believed in the old rules all along will, of course, feel vindicated. And those who have staked their lives on the new rules will be livid and accuse Bork of all kinds of things — but the society around them demonstrates that he is right.
Not about everything, unfortunately. He devotes a few pages to a feeble defense of free market capitalism. It's the one chapter where he clearly doesn't know what he's talking about, and I wish he hadn't included it. I suspect it's there because people erroneously believe that if you're a cultural conservative, you have to worship at the shrine of the free market. I'm not of that crew, I'm afraid, and I'm rather disappointed in Bork that he doesn't see that we had the decent society of the 1950s during a time when the free market was tightly regulated by a government that leveled the playing field so that the most obnoxious aspects of unfettered capitalism couldn't prevail.
And Bork himself points out that one aspect of the 1950s — racial segregation and oppression — was clearly wrong and needed correction, and that the real correction came, as it should have come, through legislation in the 1960s.
Right now, Bork points out, the greatest single barrier to recovering our lost civilization is the courts, for our legal system has been almost completely captured by the barbarians. The very practice of using ratings from the American Bar Association in choosing judges has now become a means for the left wing to veto judges who would actually serve the law instead of rewriting it to fit current intellectual fads. And Bork's book left me convinced that our problems may be so complex as not to have a solution short of revolutionary constitutional change — which, I hasten to add, would be a nightmare of its own, scarcely likely to be an improvement over what we have now. Bork is not as pessimistic as I am, because he clearly believes in some institutions that I think have also failed us. But the fact remains that what Bork says here needed saying, and the tragedy is that because of the viciously slandered reputation of the speaker, the barbarians will pay this book no heed at all.
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