Slouching Towards Gomorrah by Robert H. Bork Read Free Book Online Page B

a Dark Ages.” 13 It may yet.
    The Sixties were, as Robert Nisbet wrote, “a decade of near revolutionary upheaval and of sustained preaching of social nihilism.” 14 Except that it was even worse than that. Unlike anyprevious decade in American experience, the Sixties combined domestic disruption and violence with an explosion of drug use and sexual promiscuity; it was a decade of hedonism and narcissism; it was a decade in which popular culture reached new lows of vulgarity. The Sixties generation combined moral relativism with political absolutism. And it was the decade in which the Establishment not only collapsed but began to endorse the most outrageous behavior and indictments of America by young radicals. It was the decade that saw victories for the civil rights movement, but it was also the decade in which much of America’s best educated and most pampered youth refused to serve the country in war, disguising self-indulgence and hatred of the United States as idealism. What W. H. Auden said of the 1930s was even more true of the 1960s: it was “a low, dishonest decade.” 15

    The message and the mood of the Sixties did not, of course, remain safely within the universities.
    By the early Seventies, a subtle panic had overtaken the Movement. The revolution that we had awaited so breathlessly was nearing the end of what we now realized would be a dry labor. The monstrous offspring of our fantasies would never be born. People who had gathered for the apocalypse were dropping off into environmentalism and consumerism and fatalism…. I watched many of my old comrades apply to graduate school in the universities they had failed to burn down so that they could get advanced degrees and spread the ideas that had been discredited in the streets under an academic cover. 16
    They didn’t go just into the universities. The radicals were not likely to go into business or the conventional practice of the professions. They were part of the chattering class, talkers interested in policy, politics, and culture. They went into politics, print and electronic journalism, church bureaucracies, foundation staffs, Hollywood careers, public interest organizations, anywhere attitudes and opinions could be influenced. And they are exerting influence. The view that radical faculties, for example, are not influencing students is the “Goldman Sachs Fallacy.” In a question period after I had given a talk, a young man said he had taught at Yale for a briefperiod and, despite radical faculty members’ attempts at indoctrination, most of his students wanted jobs at some place like Goldman Sachs, the investment bankers. He overlooked the fact that he probably did not draw radicals to his course. I pointed out that those graduates who went to Goldman Sachs would play little or no part in shaping the culture. Some of them may continue counter-cultural drug sniffing and sexual promiscuity in their off hours, but that is not the same thing as actively proselytizing for Sixties views. Those who are reached by radical professors would, like those professors, join faculties or take up other culture-shaping careers. It may be that the Left can perpetuate itself forever on our cultural heights by continuing to dominate the universities and indoctrinating its share of the young.
    Because of the universities’ expansion, this might have occurred in any event, but more slowly. The Sixties compounded the problem. An entire generation of students carried a more virulent form of intellectual class attitudes and cynicism about this society into a range of occupations outside the universities. The transformation of the
New York Times
illustrates what has happened to prestige journalism generally. A newspaper once called “the good, gray lady” is now suffused with Sixties attitudes, which are most explicit, of course, in its editorial and opinion pages, though they can be detected as well in its news pages. Similarly, Hollywood, which once celebrated