Slouching Towards Gomorrah (16 page)

So uniform is the antagonism of the intellectual class to the United States and the West that it calls for explanation. Intellectuals, after all, have not always expressed hostility to the societies in which they lived. This fact is sometimes taken to mean that something in the nature of intellectuals has changed, that the sheer perversity of modern intellectuals is to be contrasted with the healthy integration of past intellectuals into their societies. That may not be the correct interpretation. It may be in the nature of intellectuals to oppose, but prior to the closing decades of the eighteenth century, open opposition was often not safe and certainly not prudent. Schumpeter makes the point that prior to the Enlightenment intellectuals were few in number and dependent upon the support of the Church or some great patron: “the typical intellectual did not relish the idea of the stake which still awaited the heretic.” They preferred honors and comfort which could be had only from “princes, temporal or spiritual.”
²²
What freed them was the invention of the printing press and the rise of the bourgeoisie, which enabled intellectuals to find support from a new patron, the mass audience. Schumpeter places the decline of the importance of the individual patron in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.
²³
James Gardner, art editor for the
National Review
; says that artists began to direct their anger at the bourgeois state three generations after the French Revolution.
²⁴
The modern universities, foundations, museums, etc. have provided patrons for tens of thousands of disaffected intellectuals. Perhaps, then, intellectuals were always potentially hostile to the social order in which they lived but were held in check by self-interest until the public relieved them of their dependence on private patrons and the bourgeois state lost the will to suppress.

It is notable that today intellectual and moral attack on the bourgeois state and culture comes almost entirely from the left. Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset states that over time the political and cultural stances of intellectuals have shifted. Much of intellectual criticism in the last decades of the nineteenth century was aimed at crude materialism and the vulgar taste of a democratic
society. “Increasingly, however, during the twentieth century, the critical stance of the intellectuals, including first the social scientists and later the humanists within the university, took the form of a predominant sympathy for antiestablishment, liberal-left positions…. They have lent disproportionate support to atheistic, antiwar, civil rights, civil liberties for deviants, liberal Democratic, and third party causes.”
²⁵

There are several more or less plausible explanations for that shift. One is, of course, that the steady progress of the egalitarian passion eroded what was essentially an aristocratic disdain for this society so that it became more comfortable to attack the bourgeoisie from the left. Equality is always the cry of the Left. It must also have become increasingly obvious that an aristocratic pose would cost intellectuals any possibility of widespread influence or popularity and, undoubtedly, would diminish material rewards. An assault from an egalitarian position would be far more acceptable.

Schoeck thinks the intellectual’s leftism is often due to envy avoidance. Not only do people feel envy, they fear being envied. The more distinguished a man is, the more reason he has to fear envy, which may account for the number of intellectuals and artists who have been not only leftist but have dallied with communism. The substitute for religion is apparent.

Intellectuals will not like that explanation of their liberalism, just as they will not like any of the others offered here. That may
be the reason, Schoeck suggests, that envy is so little mentioned in the social science of this century, particularly in the United States. He thinks that blind spot is not accidental, and he notes the common resentment of this society by social scientists.

There are other possibilities, of course. Perhaps the movement to the left was due to a combination of the intellectuals’ hostility to bourgeois society and their well-known tendency to admire power and even brutality. We tend to forget that there was burgeoning sympathy for fascism of both the Italian and German varieties among intellectuals until that became a dangerous sentiment to express during World War II. The most powerful influence on intellectuals came earlier and lasted longer. The Russian Revolution of 1917 exemplified brutal power attacking traditional and capitalistic societies from the left. Communism being the only effective enemy of bourgeois society, and being Utopian and egalitarian into the bargain, intellectuals moved left. That many of them became not merely sympathizers or fellow travelers but Party members, a few even spies for the Soviet Union, testifies to the enormous pull of the rhetoric and ideals of the left upon intellectuals. That phase is over but we still face the active hostility of much of the intellectual class to traditional culture. The results of that hostility are partially spelled out in the remainder of this book.

Writers on the baleful influence of certain ideas commonly exonerate those who advance the ideas from blame for the results. Thus, James Q. Wilson, writing of the public philosophy that flows from the Enlightenment, says that “Most of us will continue to
enjoy [its] benefits for centuries to come. But some will know only the costs, costs imposed on them by well-meaning people who want only to do the right thing.”
²⁸
Myron Magnet, of
Fortune Magazine
and the Manhattan Institute, similarly absolves many people of anything worse than misguided efforts to help.
²⁹
Surely a number of such people want to do the right thing, are well-intentioned, but just as surely some do not act from creditable intentions. Some of our elites…professors, journalists, makers of motion pictures and television entertainment, et al.…delight in nihilism and destruction as much as do the random killers in our cities. Their weapons are just different. But who, familiar with the academic world, to take a single instance, has not seen destructive ideas spread by men and women, not because they mean well but because they want notoriety, influence, power, or just because they enjoy laying waste the structures built by others? There is no particular reason to think that people with Ph.D.s are more well-intentioned than people who dropped out of high school.

It will be extremely difficult to defend traditional values against intellectual class onslaught. Not only do the intellectuals occupy the commanding heights of the culture and the means by which values and ideas are created and transmitted, they control the most authoritarian institution of American government, the federal and state judiciaries, headed by the Supreme Court of the United States. The courts have increasingly usurped the power to make our cultural decisions for us, and it is not apparent that we have any means of redress. We turn to that next.

6

I
t is arguable that the American judiciary…the Supreme Court, abetted by the lower federal courts and many state courts…is the single most powerful force shaping our culture. There are other claimants to the title, to be sure, but the judges’ preeminence seems clear. I will focus here primarily on the Supreme Court. The Court today is, as it always has been, a legal institution, but it also undertakes to decide hot button questions of culture and politics that are, strictly speaking, none of its business.

In its cultural-political role, the Court almost invariably advances the agenda of modern liberalism. That is to say, the Justices, or a majority of them, are responsible in no small measure for the spread of both radical individualism and radical egalitarianism. The Court chose this path before the spirit of the Sixties became evident, which is another sign that the Sixties radicals did not originate but accentuated trends that were already active.

“Over and over again,” observes Robert Nisbet, “constitutional history in America is one of conflict between those insisting upon maximization of
individual
rights and those insisting upon the autonomies of the
corporate
rights of states and local communities.”
¹
The Court in modern times has regularly maximized individual
rights against the corporate rights of all intermediate institutions. In the adversarial relationship between the individual and society posited by Mill’s “one very simple principle,” the Court in matters of morality and social discipline has sided with Mill far more often than the actual Constitution warrants. But when government imposes egalitarianism, the Court has ratified that choice. When liberty and equality come into conflict, the Court almost always prefers equality, even in its modern, corrupt, egalitarian form.

This is a philosophy, or mood, that cannot be derived from the Constitution. It is approved, however, by a group we have just discussed, the intellectual class. That class has distinctive attitudes, well to the left of the American center, and their command of the avenues for the dissemination of facts (whether true or false) and attitudes, their capacity to make and unmake reputations, makes them a powerful cultural force, a force to which some judges respond and others cater. It will not have escaped the reader’s notice that judges belong to that class and so absorb its viewpoints and predilections naturally.

It is instructive that in the United Kingdom, the primary proponents of adopting a written constitution and the power of judicial review of legislation are the Labor Party and intellectuals. The reasons are obvious. That development would shift a great deal of power from the British electorate to judges who would better reflect the leftish agendas of Labor and intellectuals. Cultural and political victories would then be achieved in the courts that could not be achieved in Parliament. The British proponents of judicial supremacy have learned from the American experience.

The pure version of intellectual class leftishness, to the point of being a parody of modern liberalism, exists in institutionalized form in the American Civil Liberties Union, which has had, through litigation and lobbying, a very considerable effect upon American law and culture. William A. Donohue, a long-time student of the organization, says that the ACLU “fixes its eyes exclusively on individual rights and is deterred from its atomistic vision only when the competing issue of group equality emerges.”
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Thus, the ACLU argues on the one hand for rights to abortion, to practice prostitution, to homosexual marriage, to produce and consume pornography, and much more. Its individualism is so radical that it contends nude dancing is constitutionally protected free speech and
it opposes metal detectors in airports as an intrusion upon individual autonomy. But when equality comes into play, the ACLU is for affirmative action and generally for more government limitations on the freedoms of business owners and managers, such as the power to discharge an employee for unsatisfactory performance. The ACLU is the premier litigating and lobbying arm of modern liberalism, and it has been extremely successful. Our primary concern here, however, is with the judiciary rather than the ACLU’s influence upon the course of adjudication.