Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.

• Author: George, Robert P.
• Position: Book review

When Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1) first appeared, it bore on its dust jacket the following words of mine praising the book and its distinguished author:

The ideological triumph of liberalism among American elites, far from bringing the individual and social enlightenment it promised, has produced unprecedented decay. The principal victims of this decay are the poorest and most vulnerable among us, those most in need of a healthy culture. Bork courageously and boldly states these truths. A judge as wise as Solomon has become a prophet as powerful as Isaiah. (2) That is what I thought then, and I believe it even more firmly now. It was not that I agreed with everything that Judge Bork said in the book. I strongly dissented, for example, from Judge Bork's suspicious attitude toward the natural rights teaching and equality doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, (3) though it must be said that, even in the chapters in which he articulates the grounds of his skepticism about the Declaration, I found characteristically Borkean flashes of insight and many important truths. Rather, what seemed to me prophetic about the book was its profound appreciation of the character-shaping, or soul-crafting, role of culture. Particularly, the book was deadly accurate in describing and warning about the ways in which the triumph of liberal ideology among American elites is corroding public morality and damaging the interests of all of us, especially the interests of the poorest and most vulnerable. Judge Bork recognized our common interest in maintaining a social environment--a "moral ecology," as I have elsewhere described it (4)--that is conducive to virtue and at least minimally inhospitable to what the great British jurist Patrick Devlin referred to as "the grosser forms of vice." (5)

I have in my own writings, both before the publication of Slouching Towards Gomorrah and after, offered philosophical criticisms of what I regard as the illusion of moral neutrality, (6) which is the centerpiece of much liberal and libertarian legal and political theory, and has been championed by the late John Rawls, (7) Ronald Dworkin, (8) and the late Robert Nozick. (9) I have tried to illustrate the many ways in which beliefs, attitudes, and choices are shaped in any society--not just in ours--by the framework of understandings and expectations that to a considerable extent constitute a society's public morality and would do so even in the strict libertarian's utopia. (10) I have previously sought to show that the acts of private parties, even the apparently private acts of private parties, can and often do have public consequences; indeed, such private acts sometimes have extensive and profound public consequences. (11) It will come as no surprise, then, that I...