Slouching Towards Gomorrah

by Robert H. Bork

  In a seminar we taught together, Alexander Bickel got into just this argument with the students (who were not particularly radical). To illustrate his point, Bickel asked them to suppose a group of a dozen people trying to decide whether to picnic at the beach or in the mountains. It turns out that five of the group are utterly indifferent but want to vote on the question anyway. Bickel contended that they should not be allowed to vote, that the outcome should not be determined, whimsically, by people who have no interest in it. But many, perhaps most, of the students thought the right to vote was more important than the desires of those who cared about the location of the picnic. This feeling explains efforts, such as the Motor-Voter Act, to make voters out of people who don’t care about elections. Nor was it just the right to vote; the students wanted an end to status. One student said to me that the faculty and the students would get along if we conceded that neither side knew anything. I was willing to concede half his proposition. When they moved out to the wider society, those students did not know a great deal more than when they entered the universities, but they had many more targets for their egalitarianism. They carried with them the belief that hierarchies are presumptively illegitimate, and very nearly conclusively so. From there it is a short step to the rejection of the achievement principle since differing achievements create hierarchies.

  Karl Mannheim, a German sociologist, saw this coming at least as early as 1940. He proposed that three principles for the selection of elites…blood, property, and achievement…have marked different historical periods.20 Aristocratic society chose elites primarily on the blood principle; bourgeois society on the property principle; modern democracy has stressed the achievement principle. These were never entirely pure principles; achievement, for instance, could lift one into the elite even when one of the other two principles was dominant. Of more interest to our current situation is that Mannheim also wrote: “The real threat of contemporary mass society [is] … that it has recently shown a tendency to renounce the principle of achievement as a factor in the struggle of certain groups for power, and has suddenly established blood and other criteria as the major factors to the far-reaching exclusion of the achievement principle.”21 If we recognize reward according to race, ethnicity, and sex as aspects or analogues of the blood principle, it is obvious how far the achievement principle has been discarded in America today in the name of equality.

  The rise in hostility to inequalities of status or condition seems a very peculiar phenomenon. It is easy enough to understand dislike of inequalities in legal and political rights. Equality in those respects is a guard against tyranny and irrationality, which is a form of tyranny. A statute or judicial decision providing that left-handed drunk drivers must be imprisoned but right-handed ones will merely be fined would violate equality because the distinction bears no conceivable relationship to the purpose of the law. When the distinction is rational…for example, between drunk and sober drivers, the inequality of legal consequences is considered just. A perception of this sort was the original basis for the civil rights laws. Once it was agreed that the sex or race of a job applicant had no rational relationship to job performance, non-discrimination was thought a proper goal for the law to pursue. It is true that the discrimination was not the command of government but the choice of individuals and private organizations. But it was believed to be so widespread as to have almost the force of law.

  What is harder to understand is the radical egalitarian notion that equality must be imposed even when very rational distinctions militate against it. That notion caused the prompt skewing of the non-discrimination laws by the bureaucrats and courts into whose care the implementation of the policy was given. Nondiscrimination became discrimination, but against different people: white males. The new discrimination did not violate the tenets of radical egalitarianism, because modern liberals, who control these policies, do not think in terms of individuals but in terms of groups. Thus, proportional representation of groups in the workplace, on faculties, and in student bodies looks like non-discrimination to them. That is the rationale for affirmative action.

  The passion for equality is especially virulent among intellectuals, or at least academics, two groups that are by no means identical. Though the theme of equality runs everywhere in the writings and teachings of professors of law, sociology, political science, history, the humanities, etc., the most celebrated and influential work is that of John Rawls.22 For many years, Rawls has worked assiduously and with high intelligence to develop the principles of a just social order. Yet because he was determined to establish equality as one fundamental requirement, the results are most unhappy. One of the principles he develops is that, to be just, social and economic inequalities must “be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.”23 He does not consider the enormous bureaucratic despotism that would be required to enforce that principle (or, rather, to attempt its enforcement, since the requirement is clearly unadministrable).

  Rawls and his admirers would probably not think that a valid objection since the object of his enterprise can be seen as devising criteria by which existing societies can be compared and judged. It is necessary, therefore, to address the principle on those terms, and on those terms it clearly fails. What reason is there to think that justice requires such a principle? There is none. A social or economic inequality will almost certainly have no effect on the “least advantaged.” The millionaires wealth does not cause the paupers poverty. The millionaire’s investments may make it possible for the pauper to find a job, though he will be less benefitted by those investments than is the millionaire, so that Rawls’ requirement is not met. The intellectuals or the socialites social status does not cause the social status that anyone else possesses. Why in either case is it just to condemn the inequality? Rawls’ condition could only be met by bringing everyone down to the economic and social condition of the least advantaged. It is difficult to imagine any reason for that other than envy or the flaunting of moral superiority. The envy and display of moral, superiority, however, is not that of the pauper or the sewer worker; it is that of the modern liberal.22†24

  The condition Rawls demands is pernicious because it condemns all actual societies, including that of the United States, by setting a requirement that can never be satisfied. This legitimates, from a left-liberal perspective, a ground for perpetual attacks upon and hostility towards the hierarchies and lines of authority of this society as it is, or even as it could possibly become. Whatever Rawls’ own intentions may be, such demands for extreme equality are typically weapons in the hands of the liberal-left, which is why Rawls’ work is acclaimed in academia.

  Rawls has the burden of proof backward. A free society produces inequalities of all sorts. No vital society can exist without inequalities. Yet when a demand is made for greater equality than freedom produces, the defender of rewards according to achievement is thrown on the defensive and expected to justify the inequality. It would be more sensible to demand that the proponent of greater equality show that that would produce a greater general benefit than does freedom to achieve.

  It is obvious that a society attempting to implement Rawls’ principles would have to submit to despotism. Radical egalitarianism cannot be implemented by individuals, families, or any group other than government. As government taxes more and subsidizes more, a greater portion of society’s wealth passes through its hands. Individuals and families have less income to dispose of as they see fit, which is why Jouvenel said that “redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.”25 The same thing is true of redistributions of jobs, educational opportunities, access to credit, etc., through government action. All of this requires centralization, larger government, and a vastly increased apparatus of bureaucratic coercion.

  Wood and Manchester are right. Equality is “the single most powerful and radical ideological force
in all of American history” and egalitarianism became our “triumphant passion” in this century. This is having, and will continue to have, very unpleasant consequences. As the late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky wrote: “[R]ising egalitarianism will lower our standard of living, decrease our health, debase public discourse, lower the quality of public officials, weaken democracy, make people more suspicious of one another, and (if it be possible) worse. Worse is the constant denigration of American life…our polity, economy, and society…with no viable alternative to take its place.”26 We will see the truth of those propositions throughout this book.

  Once more, none of this is new. Tocqueville sounded the warning well over a century ago: the principle of equality prepares men for government that “covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided…. Such a power … stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”27 This “servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind”28 he saw was not at all incompatible with the sovereignty of the people; it is just that the ability to elect representatives from time to time becomes less and less important. “The evils that extreme equality may produce are slowly disclosed; they creep gradually into the social frame; they are seen only at intervals; and at the moment at which they become most violent, habit already causes them to be no longer felt.”29

  Power in the “new despotism” will be gentle because government will try to protect its citizens from every occasion for suffering, physical or moral. Democratic man, thinking that others are like himself, identifies with anyone who suffers.30 This compassion born of the passion for equality leads to the power of claiming victim status. We have become what Charles J. Sykes called a nation of victims.31 The list of victim groups…minorities, women, homosexuals, the disabled, the obese, the young, the old…is virtually endless, including at one time everybody but ordinary white males. Now, however, there is even a men’s movement claiming victim status. Putative victims stress their pain as a way of demanding special treatment from others, and they often get it. If there is power in claiming to feel pain as a victim, there is also power to be gained by the politician who assures us that “I feel your pain.”

  The last line of Democracy in America reads: “The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal, but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.”32

  5

  “Intellectuals” and Modern Liberalism

  In tracing the progression of liberty and equality to their present corrupt states of moral anarchy and despotic egalitarianism, the influence of the “intellectual” class must be noticed. Intellectual is in quotes to indicate that most of that class is not involved with serious mental work. Its members are generally critical of, if not actively hostile to, bourgeois society and culture. They are, moreover, susceptible to Utopian fantasies. As Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel laureate in economics, observed: “The mood of [the West’s] intellectual leaders has long been characterized by disillusionment with its principles, disparagement of its achievements, and exclusive concern with the creation of ‘better worlds.’”1

  The economist Joseph Schumpeter defined the class of intellectuals and saw qualities in them that may explain both their hostility and their fantasizing:

  Intellectuals are in fact people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs. This touch in general accounts for another…the absence of that first-hand knowledge of them which only actual experience can give.2

  Schumpeter’s acidic view of intellectuals is understandable enough: he was on the Harvard faculty. Intellectuals in Schumpeter’s sense are often referred to as the “chattering class,” people who spend their time, and usually make their livings, by producing or distributing, at wholesale or retail, ideas and symbols. They need not be, and often are not, very good at dealing with ideas. They may not even be very intelligent or sensible.

  The intellectual class, then, is composed of people whose mindset is very like that of the student radicals of the Sixties: hostility to this culture and society coupled with millenarian dreams. Those students, like Schumpeter’s intellectuals, had no direct responsibility for practical affairs, no first-hand knowledge of the worlds workings, and hence were free to demand that reality be something other than what it was or could be. People so constituted are, in today’s circumstances, necessarily of the Left.

  Intellectuals may be intellectually negligible, but they are an important cultural force nonetheless. Because they wield the power of language and symbols, their values and ideas are broadcast by the press, movies, television, universities, primary and secondary schools, books and magazines, philanthropies, foundations, and many churches. Thus, intellectuals are influential out of all proportion to their numbers. Worse, it may well be that their leftist political and cultural attitudes are permanent, beyond the reach of rational argument.

  That somber thought is suggested by Max Weber’s analysis of the psychology of intellectuals, an analysis that fits well with what we observe in the intellectuals who drive modern liberalism:

  The salvation sought by the intellectual is always based on inner need, and hence it is at once more remote from life, more theoretical and more systematic than salvation from external distress, the quest for which is characteristic of nonprivileged classes. The intellectual seeks in various ways … to endow his life with a pervasive meaning, and thus to find unity with himself, with his fellow men, and with the cosmos…. As a consequence, there is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject to an order that is significant and meaningful.3

  The inner need for pervasive meaning was satisfied through most of history in Western civilization by religion. But as religious faith began a retreat, beginning in the eighteenth century and proceeding apace in the nineteenth and twentieth, the intellectuals need for meaning did not decline but remained urgent. Now, however, meaning must be found in a secular belief system. It is difficult to think of anything that would fit this specification for most intellectuals other than politics. For a few, meaning might be found in devotion to a field like scientific inquiry, but for the vast majority of intellectuals, for whom no such levels of achievement are possible, politics must be the answer. To be a civil religion, however, this politics cannot be the politics of mundane clashes of material interests and compromises; it must be a politics of ideology.

  In our time that means left-wing politics, which offers a comprehensive world view and a promise of ultimate salvation in a Utopia that conventional politics cannot offer. The religious impulse underlying left radicalism has often been noted. Weber remarked that when certain types of German intellectualism turned against religion, there occurred “the rise of the economic, eschatological faith of socialism.”4 Not only communism but fascism and Naziism were faith systems of the Left, offering transcendental meaning to their adherents.

  It requires extraordinary circumstances for fascism or communism to come to power openly as a mass movement, but, even in relatively stable societies, devotion by any significant number of people to radical politics can be enormously damaging. It is well to recall Peter Berger’s comparison of the New Left of the Sixties with the European fascists. Modern liberalism, the descendant and spiritual heir of the New Left, is what fascism looks like when it has captured significant institutions, most notably the universities, but has no possibility of becoming a mass movement or of gaining power over government or the broader society through force or the threat of force. Power must then be sought in increments and
by indirection. There are, of course, shades of modern liberalism, just as there were of fascism. The more extreme varieties are likely to be found these days on campuses or in public interest ORGANIZATIONS, but there are many more people who vaguely share many of the assumptions of modern liberalism and thereby lend it a power the extremists could not muster on their own.

  Weber even identified the groups who would be subject to the yearnings for transcendence that produce modern liberals. Richard Grenier, a commentator on culture, capsulates Weber’s prediction:

  Among intellectuals of high social and economic standing most subject to longings for meaning, Max Weber listed, prophetically: university professors, clergymen, government officials, certain nobles, “coupon-clippers,” and, at the time farther down on the social scale, journalists, school teachers, “wandering poets,” and some self-taught proletarians…. Drawn up a full half-century before the shock waves of political radicalism that swept through many of these exact social classes in America in the 1960s and early 1970s, this is a remarkable list.5

  By “coupon clippers” Weber undoubtedly meant those who live on inherited wealth, a fact that explains, for example, why the great foundations established by wealthy conservatives often turn left when the second or third generation takes over. “Wandering poets,” the artistic class, could be translated today as Robert Red-ford, Jane Fonda, Gore Vidal, and those of similar ilk.