Judge Dread

Robert Bork's hyperbolic assault on contemporary culture is a best-seller. But it has even his conservative allies backing away.

Walter Olson from the April 1997 issue

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In fact the chart of supposed linear decline shows no such thing, even accepting Bork's premises on what is good and bad in culture. As he concedes, TV is portraying police and prosecutors more often as heroes these days. In film, the then widely hailed and now almost forgotten steamfest Last Tango in Paris turned out not to be a leading edge of anything, while the Star Wars series was. People eventually began laughing at Madonna, and not in a nice way, which may be one reason she's trying to move on to serious roles now. Individually, most adolescents who act out do not proceed in a straight line ever downward to crash in early romantic deaths: Something causes most of them to readjust their time horizons in search of longer-term satisfactions, in the mysterious process known as growing up. The thesis of cultural declinists must be that the process of unforced improvement and learning we see take place in individuals all the time couldn't possibly take place writ large.

But Bork needs his model of linear decline because he's determined to make the argument that persuasion, change of fashion, natural maturing processes, and ridicule can never suffice to elevate the tone of one or another area of culture: The cops must instead be called in. For a "serious attempt to root out the worst in our popular culture," he wishes to argue, "directly coercive responses may be required." When he proceeds to his call for censorship, he has little patience for the drawing of conventional lines between private adult perusal (OK) and public display or availability to children (not necessarily OK). Government should be regulating adults' morals every bit as much as children's, in his view. Remarkably, he manages to view bawdiness behind closed doors as worse, not better, than in public places: "The more private viewing becomes, the more likely is it that salacious and perverted tastes will be indulged." He brushes aside as irrelevant efforts to get the taxpayers out of funding such things: Mapplethorpe's and Serrano's pictures "should not be shown in public, whoever pays for them." His premise, in fact, is the government's right to guide and shape the characters of adults, which means that in his view censorship should cover violence as well as sex, and plain old prose as well as videos, record lyrics, and the like.

The upshot, if Bork had his way, would be a repression of culture that would go in some crucial respects beyond anything of which living Americans have memory, as in the case of his proposed right of censors to control private reading of violent prose. For that matter, since violence or sex are by no means the only types of content that might corrupt character, there's no particular reason why censorable categories should remain limited to those two. Why not ban portrayals that glamorize disrespect to parents? And if the source of all this is the state's right to mold adult character, why stop at prohibition of bad texts? Why not let officials prescribe mandatory reading, listening, and viewing lists so as to promote character formation? Bork feels it necessary to deny he'd actually go this far, but it's hard to see why not. And though he also disclaims any intent to censor political advocacy as such, he's disturbingly eager to chip away at areas closely related to such advocacy -- proposing, for example, much broader government power to punish speech that advocates unlawful conduct. One wonders whether he would start with the First Things symposium.

In these matters, too, conservative reviewers did not exactly unite in a round of general cheers. One of the more devastating treatments came in The American Spectator from Donald Lyons, the Wall Street Journal theater critic and regular contributor to The New Criterion whose writing over the years has displayed an uncompromising cultural conservatism. Lyons started by observing that "an incisive legal mind does not necessarily make for incisive cultural criticism," and got rougher from there. He also nailed Bork on his dodginess about who would get to wield the censorship power. "About concrete remedies he remains evasive, as when he suggests that 'lyrics, motion pictures, television, and printed material are candidates' for censoring. By whom?" The Spectator's letters column exploded in anger, but Lyons stood his ground.

Several reviewers of a traditionalist bent, in outlets like The Wall Street Journal and National Review, found it hard to swallow Bork's alternately dismissive and chilly view of the Declaration of Independence and the various Founders involved in its writing and adoption, as well as of such venerable institutions as judicial review. (The book's least conservative moment comes with a throwaway proposal to allow Congress a right of simple legislative override of Supreme Court decisions.) Even The Weekly Standard couldn't accept what its reviewer, Tod Lindberg, called the book's "one-sidedness" and "relentless morbidity," finding its arguments "not finally persuasive." Lindberg cited a passage in which Bork reflected that the downfall of the Berlin Wall might have been a mixed blessing for former East Germans, since it exposed them to the degradation of Americanized culture.

Artists in Uniform is the title of Max Eastman's brilliant, long-out-of-print account of the left-wing artistic politics of the 1930s, an episode in which an assortment of driven ideological commissars, feeling sure that cultural problems were political at core and that world history hung in the balance of aesthetic and creative debates, demanded that American artists, writers, and critics choose up sides -- are you for the health and well- being of the People, or for its enemies? But as recruits soon learned, the price of enlistment was a demand that they check their aesthetic sense, professional integrity, and artistic freedom with the officers in charge at the camp gate.

With Slouching Towards Gomorrah, some of the aspiring headquarters staff of the proposed culture war may have sounded their call to arms, imagining they've found their general on horseback. But it's a free country, and they have no actual powers of conscription. And so all round the edges of the mustering field can already be seen the sight of the intended troops casting aside the proffered uniforms and melting away, back to civilian pursuits.