Parenting & Family Quote by Robert Bork

Bork’s line is a neat little indictment dressed up as genealogy: modernity isn’t just flawed, it’s the Enlightenment’s offspring, and its failure is therefore baked into its parentage. The phrasing matters. “Unaided reason” isn’t a neutral description of rational thought; it’s a jab at the Enlightenment fantasy that human affairs can be engineered like geometry, with tradition, religion, and inherited moral limits treated as optional accessories. By choosing “became apparent,” Bork frames the verdict as an empirical discovery rather than an ideological preference, as if history itself ran the experiment and returned the data.

The intent is conservative and corrective: to argue that a “good society” requires extra-rational authorities - moral consensus, custom, faith, communal norms - to restrain the centrifugal force of individual autonomy. Subtext: when reason is left to govern alone, it doesn’t deliver liberation; it dissolves shared meanings and leaves power to rush in where moral restraint used to be. It’s also a rebuke to liberal jurisprudence and technocratic governance, the idea that courts, experts, or abstract rights-talk can substitute for thick moral culture.

Context sharpens the edge. Bork, a Reagan-era jurist and political lightning rod after his bruising Supreme Court nomination fight, spent a career warning that legal “neutrality” and secular rationalism were smuggling in radical social change. This sentence compresses that worldview: modernity didn’t merely drift off course; it proved, in his telling, that reason without a moral tether can’t build the humane order it promised.