“Slouching Towards Gomorrah”

“Slouching Towards Gomorrah” is Robert Bork’s name for a perceived American slide into cultural decadence, and the book treats his lament as an ideological deadlock: Bork recognizes that demand sustains the market for degrading entertainment, yet locates that demand in human nature rather than in capitalism’s own expansionary logic.

The Lament and Its Explanation

Bork’s argument begins by rejecting the claim that the entertainment industry imposes depravity on an unwilling public. The demand, he says, is already there. That demand does not excuse those who supply degraded material, any more than demand for crack excuses a crack dealer, but Bork insists that the underlying fault lies in human nature when it is not restrained from outside. He points to an eager, growing market for depravity and to profitable industries organized to serve it.

The book’s criticism turns on what Bork’s explanation leaves out. Capitalism, it argues, must continually create new demands to sustain its expanding reproduction. By attributing the appetite for depravity directly to human nature, Bork avoids recognizing that the consumer culture he condemns is also a consequence of the capitalist economy he supports. His appeal for stronger restraint therefore treats the cultural symptom as an external enemy rather than confronting its connection to the economic order.

A Contradiction That Turns Back

The resulting contradiction is political as well as moral. In fighting liberal permissiveness, moral conservatives are, in the book’s analysis, fighting an ideological consequence of the unrestrained capitalist economy they passionately defend. Their opposition to decadence thus turns against the other side of their own position. The passage connects this paradox to the “cultural contradictions of capitalism,” a formulation associated with Daniel Bell.

The Berlin Wall episode sharpens the irony. Bork disapproves of Michael Jackson’s crotch-clutching performance at the Super Bowl; another panelist responds that desire for such American cultural pleasures helped bring down the Berlin Wall, and suggests that restoring the Wall would be a fitting response. Bork recognizes the irony in that retort, but, as the book stresses, misses its deeper implication: the popular culture he deplores is not simply an adversary of the political order he favors. The phrase “Slouching Towards Gomorrah” consequently serves as more than a denunciation of decadence; in this discussion, it marks the unresolved contradiction between condemning consumer culture and defending the economic system that helps produce it.