Slouching Towards Gomorrah Read Online Free

If society should reach a chaotic condition of warring groups and individual alienation, a conditionin which even personal security is problematic for a majority of its people, authoritarian government may be accepted. Worse, a movement with transcendental principles, not necessarily benign ones, may promise community and ultimately exact a fearful cost.
    The encroachments of liberalism upon traditional ways of thinking and acting have created not just a battle here and a skirmish there but a conflict across the entire culture. This is different in kind from the usual piecemeal revisions we have seen in the past. “Now and then,” according to literary scholar Lionel Trilling, “it is possible to observe the moral life in the process of revising itself, perhaps by reducing the emphasis it formerly placed upon one or another of its elements, perhaps by inventing and adding to itself a new element, some mode of conduct or of feeling which hitherto it had not regarded as essential to virtue.” 7 A nations moral life is, of course, the foundation of its culture. When Trilling’s words were published in 1970, though he had seen the convulsions of the Sixties, he could not have imagined the scope and depth of the “revisions” yet to come. What we experience now is not the subtraction or addition of one or another of the elements of our moral life, but an assault that aims at, and largely accomplishes, sweeping changes across the entire cultural landscape. Large chunks of the moral life of the United States, major features of its culture, have disappeared altogether, and more are in the process of extinction. These are being, or have already been, replaced by new modes of conduct, ways of thought, and standards of morality that are unwelcome to many of us.
    Trilling went on: “The news of such an event [a revision in moral life] is often received with a degree of irony or some other sign of resistance.” 8 Given the comprehensive scope of the changes in our moral-cultural life, it is not surprising that signs of resistance, though late in appearing, are becoming equally widespread and vigorous. The addition or subtraction of a single virtue may provoke only a degree of irony, but when the changes are across the board, the thrust and the resistance add up to a major conflict. Irony there is in plentiful supply, but also anger, and even a continuing realignment of our political parties along cultural lines. In the future, our political contests will also be cultural struggles.
    This book will examine the changes wrought by liberalism in a variety of seemingly disparate areas of life, from popular entertainmentto religion to scholarship to constitutional law, from abortion to crime to feminism, and more. It will attempt to answer where modern liberalism came from and why its ideas are pressed so immoderately. Are cultural trends cyclical or is this trend inherent in Western civilization, or even, perhaps, in human nature itself? There is a case for one of the latter answers, and if that argument is correct, the future is probably bleak. No one can be certain of that, however. Cultures in decline have, unpredictably, turned themselves around before. Perhaps ours will too.
    I begin with the theory and the practice of the decade of the Sixties, the decade not only of burning law books but of revolutionary nihilism, occupied and terrorized universities, and the Establishment’s surrender. The Sixties may be seen in the universities as a mini-French Revolution that seemed to fail, but ultimately did not. The radicals were not defeated by a conservative or traditionally liberal opposition but by their own graduation from the universities. And theirs was merely a temporary defeat. They and their ideology are all around us now. That is the reason for understanding the Sixties.

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What They Did and Where They Went
    Epiphanies:
they made the world worthy of us. We searched for them like stargazers. This was part of the decades