# Slouching Towards Gomorrah ![rw-book-cover](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51ZT6Rq5-2L._SL200_.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[Robert H. Bork]] - Full Title: Slouching Towards Gomorrah - Category: #books ## Highlights - Because my thesis is that these developments have been coming on for a long time and may be inherent in Western civilization, ([Location 62](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=62)) - To understand our current plight, we must look back to the tumults of those years, which brought to a crescendo developments in the Fifties and before that most of us had overlooked or misunderstood. ([Location 78](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=78)) - The Fifties were the years of Eisenhower’s presidency. Our domestic world seemed normal and, for the most part, almost placid. The signs were misleading. Politics is a lagging indicator. ([Location 82](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=82)) - Culture eventually makes politics. ([Location 84](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=84)) - The spirit of the Sixties revived in the Eighties and brought us at last to Bill and Hillary Clinton, the very personifications of the Sixties generation arrived at early middle age with its ideological baggage intact. ([Location 86](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=86)) - With each new evidence of deterioration, we lament for a moment, and then become accustomed to it. ([Location 98](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=98)) - So unrelenting is the assault on our sensibilities that many of us grow numb, finding resignation to be the rational, adaptive response to an environment that is increasingly polluted and apparently beyond our control. That is what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan calls “defining deviancy down.”1 Moynihan cites the “Durkheim constant.”2 Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology, posited that there is a limit to the amount of deviant behavior any community can “afford to recognize.”3 As behavior worsens, the community adjusts its standards so that conduct once thought reprehensible is no longer deemed so. As behavior improves, the deviancy boundary moves up to encompass conduct previously thought normal. Thus, a community of saints and a community of felons would display very different behavior but about the same amount of recognized deviancy. ([Location 104](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=104)) - “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling,” Krauthammer wrote, “it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant.”5 This situation is thoroughly perverse. ([Location 119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=119)) - The enemy within is modern liberalism, a corrosive agent carrying a very different mood and agenda than that of classical or traditional liberalism. ([Location 127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=127)) - Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason. The response of liberalism was not to turn to religion, which modernity had seemingly made irrelevant, but to abandon reason. ([Location 130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=130)) - “Modern liberalism” may not be quite the correct name for what I have in mind. I use the phrase merely to mean the latest stage of the liberalism that has been growing in the West for at least two and a half centuries, and probably longer. ([Location 134](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=134)) - The defining characteristics of modern liberalism are radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and radical individualism (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification). ([Location 140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=140)) - Every new generation constitutes a wave of savages who must be civilized by their families, schools, and churches. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=365)) - Graglia points out that changing the behavior of the Court through appointments is a failed tactic. Republican presidents have appointed Justice after Justice with the avowed intention of changing the Courts direction. That has not worked. Most of those appointed turn out not to be restrained or start that way but then, having no firm judicial philosophy, migrate to the left. Presidents Reagan and Bush, who quite deliberately tried to bring the Court back to a judicial rather than a political role, had five appointments, three of whom voted to retain Roe v. Wade. ([Location 2017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=2017)) - It is entirely predictable that many of the elderly, ill, and infirm will be killed, and often without their consent. This is where radical individualism has taken us. ([Location 2955](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=2955)) - When a society revises its attitude towards life and death, we can see the direction of its moral movement. For that reason, it is necessary to examine the morality of such practices as abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia and to try to determine where they are likely to lead. ([Location 2956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=2956)) - For years I adopted, without bothering to think, the attitude common among secular, affluent, university-educated people who took the propriety of abortion for granted, even when it was illegal. The practice’s illegality, like that of drinking alcohol during Prohibition, was thought to reflect merely unenlightened prejudice or religious conviction, the two being regarded as much the same. ([Location 2965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=2965)) - The slightest reflection would have suggested that non-human or semi-human blobs of tissue do not magically turn into human beings. ([Location 2971](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=2971)) - Roe and the decisions reaffirming it are equal in their audacity and abuse of judicial office to Dred Scott v. Sandford. Just as Dred Scott forced a southern pro-slavery position on the nation, Roe is nothing more than the Supreme Courts imposition on us of the morality of our cultural elites. ([Location 2974](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=2974)) - In thinking about abortion, it is necessary to address two questions. Is abortion always the killing of a human being? If it is, is that killing done simply for convenience? I think there can be no doubt that the answer to the first question is yes; and the answer to the second is almost always. ([Location 2981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=2981)) - Abortions in cases of deformity, etc., are a very small fraction of the total and, because they introduce special factors, do not cast light on the direction of our culture as do abortions of healthy pre-borns performed for convenience. ([Location 2987](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=2987)) - Francis Crick, the Nobel laureate and biophysicist, is quoted as having estimated that “the amount of information contained in the chromosomes of a single fertilized human egg is equivalent to about a thousand printed volumes of books, each as large as a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica”1 Such a creature is not a blob of tissue or, as the Roe opinion so infelicitously put it, a “potential life.” As someone has said, it is a life with potential. ([Location 3000](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=3000)) - the Court has departed from any plausible meaning of the Constitution or a statute. We have, then, national law with respect to our culture that has nothing to do with the Constitution or statute but everything to do with the captious ponderings of a majority of the Justices, led in turn by the latest visions of the self-anointed intellectual elite. ([Location 6465](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003YCOOZS&location=6465))