Robert Bork gave this address at The Gathering at Alexandria where 75 Latter-day Saint community leaders met to decide how family-centered citizens could fight moral decline.  From that meeting the Family Leader Network was formed.  We invite you to learn about the organization and what you can do to make a difference in the world.  Go to www.familyleader.net and sign up for the free weekly update and take action alerts.

My subject this morning is the state of American culture and what, if anything, can be done about it.  The reason for that assignment, I suspect, is that I once wrote a book called Slouching Towards Gormorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.  It was not your basic feel good book.  The title was, of course, a play on William Butler Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" whose last lines are:

            And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
            Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

I thought the increasingly rough beast of American culture was not slouching toward Bethlehem but Gomorrah.  The nature of the beast is suggested earlier in the poem in words meant to describe the state of Western society:

            Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,
            Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
            The best lack all conviction, while the worst
            Are full of passionate intensity.

Writing that book gave me a reputation -- entirely undeserved -- for gloom.  So much so that my wife asked me to write something cheerful for a change.  I promised her that my next book would be called Little Mary Sunshine.  Unfortunately, Kate O'Beirne of National Review overheard and said "Don't believe him.  The book is actually going to be called Little Mary Sunshine Gets Skin Cancer.

This morning I will begin with the case for gloom and skin cancer and then move on to some reasons for hope.

The Supreme Court and the Culture War

I will necessarily refer to the Supreme Court because it is both a cause and a symptom of movements in our culture.  As John Derbyshire recently put it, "We Americans are heading into a 'crisis of foundations'..... Our judicial elites, with politicians and pundits close behind, are already at work deconstructing our most fundamental institutions -- marriage, the family, religion, equality under the law."

Courts, even with the assistance of politicians and bureaucrats, have not, of course, accomplished this deconstruction entirely on their own.  They reflect and advance a cultural movement that has been growing for many decades and which erupted and became full-blown in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period commonly called the Sixties Decade. 

What was then a counterculture radicalized attitudes among many of our elites.  The Court which always, sooner or later, adopts the attitudes of the dominant elites, came to embrace what can only be called Sixties values -- that is radical personal autonomy in moral matters and group identity in racial and gender issues.  In a word, the Court, along with the elites of the universities and journalism among others, has been overtaken by political correctness. 

The Olympians

A word about the elites to which justices not only belong but to whom they respond.  They form the opposition in the culture war in which we are engaged.  This morning I will call them the "Olympians."  Their state of mind was accurately described by the British political philosopher Kenneth Minogue.

"Olympianism" (he wrote) "is the project of an intellectual elite that believes it enjoys superior enlightenment and that its business is to spread this benefit to those living on the lower slopes of human achievement......  Olympianism burrowed like a parasite into the most powerful institution of the emerging knowledge economy -- the universities."

The change in the universities in the past few decades is clear.  The dominant mood in many faculties went from liberal to left.  A once fairly tolerant liberalism turned rancid and angrily moralistic.

From the universities Olympianism metastasized to other institutions that shape our culture -- the news media (print and electronic), Hollywood and television entertainment, many clergy and church bureaucracies, foundation staffs, and -- perhaps the most potent of all -- much of the federal and state judiciaries, including the Supreme Court of the United States. 

Redesigning the Constitution

The Supreme Court is particularly potent because when it speaks in the name of the Constitution, whether it speaks truly or not, as to that issue the democratic process is at an end.  That is why so many interest groups that cannot get their cultural agenda through any legislature, appeal to the justices to make up new and previously unimagined rights.  And the justices do just that.  As Justice Scalia said in a dissent, "Day by day, case by case, [the Court] is busy designing a Constitution for a country I do not recognize."

You will notice that the Constitution is being redesigned always to move the country to the cultural left.  An understanding of why that is so may be gained by combining the insights of Max Weber and Kenneth Minogue.  Weber wrote that

The intellectual seeks in various ways... to endow his life with 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.

The only transcendental alternative after the decline of religion was socialism.  Conservatism cannot compete on those terms.  If the dream of socialism was equality in all aspects of life, conservatism had no alternative dream, no transcendent principle that can make life significant and meaningful to secular intellectuals.  It seeks to see the wisdom and benefits of existing practices and institutions and to think carefully before adopting suggested improvement. 

Minogue notes that when socialism proved disastrous, intellectuals abandoned the "quick fix of revolution" for a more gradual course of Olympianism for instructing and molding the public.  But Olympians are highly suspicious of the people.  They believe that democracy is the only tolerable form of social coordination, but until a majority of the people have become enlightened, it must be constrained within a framework of rights, to which Olympian legislation is constantly adding.  Without these constraints, progress would be in danger from reactionary populism appealing to prejudice.

Multiplying Rights

All of these phenomena may be seen in the Supreme Court.  It legislates in the sense that it is not applying the actual Constitution.  It multiplies rights constantly.  It is amazing to the modern lawyer that in Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, written in 1833, the discussion of the Bill of Rights took up only about one fiftieth of the text.  In today's casebooks, the Bill of Rights decisions take up at least two-thirds of the pages.  It is hardly coincidental that the explosion of rights paralleled the rise of the Olympians.

The Court, I have suggested, is moved by a politically correct or Sixties Decade version of radical personal autonomy in moral matters.  The first explicit statement of this attitude came in a dissent by Justice Blackmun for four justices arguing that there is a right to homosexual sodomy.  Rejecting the view that prior cases confined the right to privacy to protection of the family, Blackmun wrote: We protect those rights [related to the family] not because they contribute, in some direct and material way, to the general public welfare, but because they form so central a part of an individual's life.  "The concept of privacy embodies the moral fact that a person belongs to himself and not to others nor to society as a whole."

Blackmun was saying that the family has no value except as it contributes to the individual's gratification.  The second sentence states that there is no moral obligation to obey any inconvenient law, and that there is no duty owed to family members, colleagues, neighbors, nation, society, or to anyone or anything outside one's own skin.  The ultimate in psychopathology or solipsism  seems to be a constitutional right.  

Matters got worse when the Court changed course and found that there was after all a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy.  Justice Kennedy's opinion stated:

No one knows what that means.  All we can be sure of is that it is politically correct, which means that it embraces a culture of expression and self-absorption, but that does not mean the attitude is innocuous.  To the contrary, it is doing serious, lasting, and perhaps permanent damage to valuable institutions, stabilizing attitudes, and essential standards.

An Indicator of Cultural Trends

Much could be said about the failures of these and scores of other cases as law.  This morning, however, I am more interested in the Court as an indicator of cultural trends.  In that light, what does the mystery passage tell us.

First, that radical individualism is, in moral matters, coming close to nihilism.  If each individual defines meaning for himself, there can be no allowable community judgment as to moral truth.  This is postmodernism, which has been defined as an uneasy alliance between nihilism and left-wing politics.  The public is not allowed the final say on moral truth, but the Olympians are.  The result is that the Court-enforced "moral truth" is always to the left of the American center.

Second, the sense of the sacred is becoming a mocked and withered virtue.  It is worth recalling what John Stuart Mill wrote.

That might have been written about the culture war in America, a culture war in which the judiciary is deeply involved, and for which it must accept a large degree of responsibility.  Almost every value, every virtue, every symbol, and every institution once regarded as sacred has now been overthrown or is in question.  I will mention a few of these institutions and symbols.

In Question

The Constitution itself has lost the meaning the framers and ratifiers understood themselves to be enacting and has become simply a launching pad for a politically correct agenda. 

Marriage and the family are mocked by a string of decisions protecting the vilest pornography and the judicial drive to normalize homosexuality.         

Protection of the aesthetic environment in which we all must live are attacked by decisions ratifying public obscenities and vulgarities in movies, on television, and in popular music.

Religion is denigrated and marginalized by decisions driving almost every manifestation of it from the public square.

Equality under the law is denied by decisions approving racial and gender preferences. 

Desecration of the flag, the symbol of patriotism, is now protected free speech.  Some commentators dismiss that with the observation that there have been few or no flag burnings since the Court's decision.  But the reason is probably that it is hardly worth burning a flag that has been reduced to a mere piece of cloth like any other.

I do not mean to suggest that the Court has worked these wonders all on its own.  You will find these attitudes in our universities and law schools, in the New York Times, on CBS, in movies and television entertainments.

Fear of Religion

Consider the parallel between the Court's rulings and elite opinion on religion.  Both display an intense hostility to religion, particularly to organized religion.  Gary Wills, an Olympian if there ever was one, saw the reelection of George Bush as the end of the Enlightenment and the return of the Dark Ages.  We are, he wrote, like radical Muslims in "fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear and hatred for modernity."

The same fear of religion as a toxic substance informs the Supreme Court's decisions under the First Amendment's prohibition of the establishment of religion.  Despite the fact that scholarship has conclusively shown that the Establishment Clause was not intended to erect a rigid wall between government and religion, the Court remorselessly goes on banning school prayer or even a moment of silence on the ground that some students might engage in stealth prayer.

Sometimes things get preposterous.  The Court has held it unconstitutional for high school students to pray before a football game that nobody be hurt.  Yet the Court has also held that nude dancing is expressive -- better not ask of what -- and therefore entitled to considerable protection as free speech.  Which led Ted Olson, the former Solicitor General, to say that since nude dancing was preferred to prayer as a means of communication, perhaps the students should dance naked before games.  I offer only the caveat that nudity must not be achieved through the Dance of the Seven Veils because that has biblical connotations and would therefore be unconstitutional.

A Serious Matter

Actually, however, this is a serious matter.  The late Christopher Lasch, by no means a conservative, asked "what accounts for [our  society's] wholesale defection from standards of personal conduct -- civility, industry, self-restraint -- that were once considered indispensable to democracy?"  He answered that a major reason is the "gradual decay of religion."  Our liberal elites, whose "attitude to religion," Lasch said, "ranges from indifference to active hostility," have succeeded in removing religion from public recognition and debate.

The relation between hostility to  religion and social pathologies such as crime seems be common, if not universal.  In Britain, for example, in 1910, 90% of children attended Sunday school.  There was virtually no crime or illegitimate births.  Today only 10% of children are in Sunday schools and the nation is awash in crime and illegitimacy; the crime rates are even higher than those of the United States.

I will mention only one other pathology common to the Olympians and the Supreme Court.  Both are devoted to the cause of abortion, including partial birth abortion, which is morally indistinguishable from infanticide.  Both the Court and the elites are determined that the profound moral issue posed by abortion be kept from the judgment of democratic government. 

It is the nightmare of American intellectuals that public policy might fall into the hands of the American people.  It is an outrage that the Court invented a right to abortion although the Constitution says precisely nothing on the topic, leaving it, as it leaves most moral issues, to the choice of the people in the various states.

What Can Be Done?

I have said enough about the sorry state of our culture and the direction it continues to pursue.  What can be done about it?

The culture war must be fought more and more by organized groups, not just individuals griping or writing letters to their congressmen.  The latter are important, but as one senator said of a nominee, "If I vote against him, millions of people will be angry for a week.  If I vote for him, the groups will never forget."  The other side has the ACLU, People for the American Way, Planned Parenthood, and hundreds of others.  We need our own organizations, organizations with institutional memories that politicians must respect. 

One obvious step is to encourage George Bush to nominate and to join him in the fight for judges who will stick to the principles of the Constitution as they were originally understood.  Olympian legislation from the bench has to be stopped if self-government and traditional values are to be preserved.

Organizations should be formed to litigate against the ACLU.  Typically, the ACLU's lawyers are far better than the city and state attorneys they face now.  Moreover, the ACLU has a program while the defendant city or state lawyers are suddenly thrust into constitutional litigation for which they are totally unprepared.

Another step is to support news organizations, movies, and the like that support traditional values or are, at least, not hostile to them.  The corollary is organized boycotts of companies that support the degradation of our culture. 

Another is to pressure universities and law schools to attain some intellectual diversity.  The situation now is shameful.  The best way to exert pressure is to withhold donations and to tell the universities why.  Too many people go on supporting fund drives out of nostalgia for their student days, not realizing that the universities are not at all the same places they attended years ago.

Cultural Alliances

It will be important to make cultural alliances across religious lines.  Orthodox Mormons, Catholics, Protestants, and Jews have more in common on cultural matters than they do with liberal members of their own faiths.  Such alliances do not require joining into one organization; they do require close cooperation between cultural conservatives of all faiths and persons of no faith in the battles that lie ahead.

No doubt some of you have additional ideas.  The need for ideas and action is crucial.  Irving Kristol, one of our wisest public intellectuals, put the case well when he wrote

Our side has to push back against the forces of cultural corruption and minority rule.  Which is why I will close with a few lines from T. S. Eliot.

      There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
      And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
      That seem unpropitious.  But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
      For us, there is only the trying.  The rest is not our business.

I take that as counsel to struggle without considering the odds, for of course the culture in which we, our children, and our grandchildren will live is our business which is why we have to try ever more persistently and intelligently to reverse the tide of collectivism and moral chaos that threatens to engulf us.