Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline by Robert H. Bork (PDF)

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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.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “A brilliant and alarming exploration of the dark side of contemporary American culture.””A brilliant blend of passionate conviction and sustained arguement. May be the most important book of the ’90s.””Clearly and gracefully written, this humane and well-reasoned analysis . . . invites the respectful attention of liberals and conservatives alike.””Clearly and gracefully written, this humane and well-reasoned analysis…invites the respectful attention of liberals and conservatives alike.”–Eugene D. Genovese, “Washington Post Book World””A brilliant and alarming exploration of the dark side of contemporary American culture. Bork has done an important and good deed.”–William J. Bennett, author of “The Book of Virtues “A brilliant blend of passionate conviction and sustained arguement. May be the most important book of the ’90s.”–Michael Novak, American Enterprise Institute About the Author Robert H. Bork has served as Solicitor General and Acting Attorney General of the United States, and as a United States Court of Appeals judge. A former professor of law at Yale Law School, he is currently a professor at Ave Maria School of Law, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the Tad and Dianne Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Also the author of the bestselling The Tempting of America, he lives with his wife in McLean, Virginia.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Patrick Deneen’s recent book, WHY LIBERALISM FAILED, looks at two different views of liberty. One (the traditional definition) says that we must have the self-discipline to control our baser instincts and drives. If we do we are liberated from them and are morally free. The more recent definition ultimately sees liberty as equivalent to license—the freedom to do anything we please. This does not free us; it ensnares and constrains us and leads to a life of alienation and emptiness in which we are, essentially, enslaved. That is where we are now, living the cultural life encouraged by the 60’s (‘if it feels good, do it’). Judge Bork was there a generation earlier; the emptiness which follows license is only one of his subjects.Judge Bork terms this phenomenon ‘radical individualism’—the individual is freed from institutional constraints (as the 60’s wished) but is nonetheless unhappy. He pairs this with ‘radical egalitarianism’, the notion that everyone should experience equality of result, regardless of personal gifts, inclinations or labors. Just as promiscuous sex and unbridled drug use lead to emptiness, the government’s efforts to achieve equality of result do not work. We sort into hierarchies nonetheless, with the bureaucratic and ‘intellectual’ elites controlling us as we see standards lowered everywhere in order to achieve equality of result that looks more like lowest-common-denominator misery rather than universal happiness.The cause of our current malaise and the reason why we are slouching towards Gomorrah is that the 60’s won the cultural wars and the ‘march through the institutions’ advocated by the radical leftist Frankfurt School has been completed. Our educational institutions are in ruins; our churches are complicit in the near-total erosion of their previous authority; the courts (particularly the Supreme Court) make law that would never pass muster in the legislative process; the press (always biased to a noticeable degree) now lacks all credibility and the ‘entertainment’ industry provides mindless nonsense as well as pornography. The nuclear family (or what’s left of it) remains under constant attack.Although he does not discuss this at great length, the principal culprit for our situation is the comfortable life provided by our economic system. We can afford to be soft, needy, self-indulgent, spoiled and indolent because our biggest challenge is not the need for food, clothing and shelter but rather the battery life of our newest entertainment device.Many individuals have argued these points, but few so eloquently as Judge Bork. This is a substantial book of 400+ pages. Considering the fact that he had significant day jobs in the law, this is a very impressive book of cultural history. Its principal strengths come from his knowledge, his wit, his refusal to pull punches and the clarity with which he sees our problems.Unfortunately, he is unable to suggest solutions to our plight beyond three that are unlikely and, in the case of two of them, highly undesirable: a major world war, a massive economic depression and a religious revival.Losing the opportunity to have him on the Supreme Court did not help our cultural cause.Bottom line: this is essential reading for anyone concerned with our cultural condition and anxious to learn more concerning its etiology.

⭐Judge Bork is a wise man with an amazing grasp of America’s history and a person with the courage to tell it like it is.As a member of the Boomer generation, I hesitated to agree with his premises, yet forged on. By the time I reached chapter seven, I was so disgusted with our nation and its pervasive negative influence on the world that I could barely go on.If you dare to face facts and have an interest in contemporary society, read this book.

⭐Never before have I read a review summarily describing the rise of the Leftist movement (at least in modern times and in American culture) than I have seen here. Bork is excellent and presents a very smart argument, one that (since most words are 5 syllables or more) may not be easy reading for everyone, but if you’re brave enough to push through and gain the understanding of the meaning of the terms used, will find yourself with a great foothold of where we stand as a country today and why. If you don’t know what a syllable is, don’t even bother reading this book.I have read the 1997 paperback edition and it would seem that society will continue to revisit the same issues until something definitive happens, as per his comments and quotes regarding the Vietnam War, which is a shocking parallel to the antagonistic and in some cases Anti-American views regarding the War in Iraq, which seems to indicate that there has been no slowing of this Leftist movement and in fact, their children will soon be throwing their hats into this arena, if not already.As a Christian in America today, one finds that the easiest and apparently most profitable way for the enemy to bring about the destruction of the family, marriage, children and the church itself is the agenda of the Left movement. Bork, in his observation that until now the work to halt the Leftism in this country has been fragmented and disorganized at best, is correct.The drive for radical individualism and radical egalitarianism is rampant in society today and one that is not limited to America, either. As morality declines and the threshold of tolerance for all things inherently evil increases, there can be no other assumption but that things will indeed continue in this way until at last, the Leftist movement will have succeeded in accomplishing its goal for a “self” driven, socialist society which at that point will be farther reaching than even they had imagined and will be beyond the point of their control.Bork’s book, though secular, should be a wake up call to Christians and non-Christians alike regarding where this country is headed. A Christian need only read the Bible to tell where indeed the world is heading.5 stars…a must read.

⭐This book, even it’s 1996 passages, could easily have been written in 2012 or 2013. Everyone points to people like Douglas Murray or Jonathan Haidt as examples of cultural critics ahead of their time, but Robert Bork (and Allan Bloom before him) were warning is in precise detail, what was to come, decades before Haidt or Murray were even graduate students. Bork mentions identity politics, post-modern academics, campus speech policing, and the wholesale adoption of homosexuality in mainstream culture, long before any of this was in anyone’s radar. To his credit, his 2004 afterword walks back his defense of censorship, having seen how the left was abandoning its support for the first amendment for political gain, 10 years before anyone else.It is true, that Bork’s attempt at defending intelligent design in this book is weak to the point of silliness (based largely on a layman’s reading of Michael Behe’s “Darwin’s Black Box), and it’s also true that his original defense of censorship is largely based on provoking disgust in the reader, which is a profoundly weak way to make the case. But in both situations, the arguments were not essential to the case made in this book, and did not detract from it. What’s more, his piercing, but accessible critiques of constitutional law as interpreted (or not) by the supreme court, reminded me of his work in The Tempting of America, and made reading the whole book well worth the effort.

⭐This edition of the book contains an Afterword that covers the further deterioration in American culture and politics into the beginning of the new century. The Olympians command the heights and have destroyed any hope of achieving the American Dream.The book describes the destruction of the cohesion of the United States. To political-elite-watchers this is a preparation for the formation of the North American Union, and eventual ‘global oligarchy’. It should be resisted, but welfare-dependency and rising permanent unemployment is intimidating the activists.Since the ‘swinging sixties’ the growth of a pornographic culture has replaced the old virtues. “[T]he Church is supposed to evangelize the culture but instead the culture is evangelizing the Church” (Robert Royal). In the United Kingdom the Church of England is guilty of a major dereliction of duty: its priestly ranks are dominated by modern liberal thinkers who have only contempt for the ‘ten Commandments’ and rarely believe the Bible Story. They are not going to throw the money-lenders out of the Temple.This is a book that describes the ‘new-liberal’ destruction of a culture that is giving acceleration to the people on their downward career on the slippery-slope to Hell.

⭐Living as we are in an age where endless liberal spin and rationalizations have clouded our collective judgement, we are fortunate that a voice like judge Bork’s speaks to us in clear, unequivocal terms. His observations are passionate but always tempered by reason and logic.It has been said that in difficult times, the obvious must be stated loudly and clearly. This is Robert Bork’s legacy and one that offers hope in the midst of our degenerative social spiral.

⭐Amazing. This book needs to be read!

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