In "The Artificial White Man," he writes: "A blue, despairing cry is coming at us from behind the trends of extreme hairdos, piercings, ethnic getups, aggressively bad taste, nose rings, tattoos, and the fashion collages that draw so badly and so freely from the worlds of the primitive, science fiction, and street gang posturing."

We've dropped moral judgment from creative thinking. The remake of the movie "Alfie," a misogynist cad, dramatically illustrates the damages wrought by the sexual revolution. In the 1965 version made in England, Michael Caine plays a nasty philanderer who has a moment of recognition of his own moral monstrousness as "an accomplice to murder" when he looks into a bucket containing a fully-formed fetus dropped there from an abortion he arranged for a woman he impregnated.

In the new version made in Hollywood (by Paramount), Alfie is a disarming, charming bounder whose only insight is that his philandering leaves him childless and a little lonely.

Republicans are widely believed to be winning the culture wars by better articulating a fundamental desire to return to traditional middle-class values. Bill Clinton told an audience at Hamilton College last week that "I think the current divisions are partly the fault of the people in my party for not engaging the Christian evangelical community in a serious discussion of what it would take to promote a real culture of life."

The ex-president is no dummy and he got it half right. You don't have to be an evangelical Christian to want to change the culture.