About book The Closing Of The American Mind (1988)
This is the best argument for conservatism I've ever read. To be fair, it's also the only one I've ever read, outside of the occasional David Brooks column. And let's be honest: Bloom is about as elitist and conservative as you can get. But he makes the position seem very enticing with his brilliant argumentation and his penetrating logic as he delves into the state of the late 20th century American citizen. It doesn't hurt that he has a staggering breadth of knowledge on just about every single Western philosopher ever.Even though it probably woulda sailed over my head, I wish I had read this book before going to college because I might have gotten a lot more out of my education if I had some clue as to where to start. As it is, I recognized myself in most of Bloom's descriptions about the students who were seeking some sort of higher life-altering experience of knowledge and subsequently being left high and dry by university administrators and faculty. I found myself agreeing with Bloom's main thesis on the importance of the humanities (i.e. the "Great Books" and authors) in the liberal education, and their catastrophic decline in the modern university canon. I even agree that maybe college shouldn't be considered for everyone as merely a de facto extension of the factory schooling technique that has turned our high schools into wastelands of learning. In fact, Bloom's writing is so engaging throughout, and his depth of knowledge so impressive, that I found myself forgiving his obvious political slant and occasional inconsistencies. There were several, however, that merit mention:At his worst, Bloom comes off as a lonely, bitter, out-of-touch old codger. This is evident in the ways that he talks down about his naive students and their quaint notions of "commitment" in the age of free love. He clearly despises the hippie movement and has done a good job of developing a logical justification. It left me with a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum. Which came first, the logical sociological insight against the ravenous hippies, or his personal distaste? More puzzling is Bloom's glib dismissal of the family as anything other than a societal convention. While granting that the mother-child bond is "perhaps the only undeniable natural social bond," (p.115) he dismisses the father out of hand as having no conceivable reason to care for his child other than some abstract desire to attain eternity through his progeny. This is, frankly, stunning. I admire cool intellectual detachment as much as most intellectuals, but to deny that there is a lasting value to human emotions such as paternal love, or even to ignore the biology of the family situation seems wildly out of character for an otherwise rational discussion. It's all the more curious given Bloom's apparent sympathy for the Nietzchian anti-rational position. If Bloom is recognizing the value of revelation and passion in our pursuit of knowledge, how can he deny such an irrational impulse as fatherly love? And a few pages later (129), arrogantly scoffing at their capacity to "care"?The next problem I had, on p. 248, was perhaps a minor point but illustrative of either Bloom's ingenuousness or his deceitful argumentation. Comparing the old (faith-based) to modern (reason-based) political regimes, Bloom actually manages to lament the disappearance of the aristocracy, because, "This means that there is no protection for the opponents of the governing principles [democracy:] as well as no respectability for them." Incredibly, Bloom completely ignores the fact that the corporations -- it's by no means a stretch to say that they form a modern aristocracy -- both oppose democratic governing principles and wield far more power than the supposed mob of "the people," the rule of which apparently haunts Bloom's nightmares but otherwise has little relation to reality. Another disturbing part is Bloom's persistent characterization of the 60s radicalization of the universities with Nazi Germany. Okay, I'll admit there are parallels. But Bloom, writing in the 80s, seemed to be predicting a catastrophe that -- had "the movement" really been as similar to Nazi Germany in the first place as he insinuates -- should have already occurred a decade before. The fact that it still hasn't occurred a quarter century later makes the claim all the more outlandish. There's also the fact that Bloom excuses Heidegger's support of the Nazis because he supposedly did it "ironically." While this may be true, it is a complete abdication of academic responsibility to ignore (and excuse, in Bloom´s case) what an ironic statement of support for a cruel dictatorship might cause in practical results, i.e. in reality. Both Heidegger's and Bloom's apologetics strike me as weasel-words at best. Then comes Bloom's glib statement (p. 320) that "You don't replace something with nothing." Talking about the criticism of the university curriculum in the 60s, he says, "The criticism of the old is of no value if there is no prospect for the new." While this may be true for the universities, to issue a blanket statement on the matter is quite simply wrong. Bloom, an apparent sympathizer of Nietzche's nihilism, should know better. Just from the example he gave of Hitler several pages before, I can say that the Nazi regime is an example of something that would have been better replaced by anything. . . yes, even nothing. Another minor problem I have is what seems to be a misuse of Socrates. I don't pretend to know more about Plato's writings than Mr. Bloom, but I thought it was pretty accepted that as Plato matured, his writings became less about accurately documenting Socrates' dialogues and more about using his mentor as a mouthpiece for Plato's own ideas. This makes the Republic, Bloom's favorite book, distinctly Platonic, and not Socratic, although he seems to worship Socrates based on the ideas there. This is pretty well explained and criticized in Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies (see my reviews of Vol. I and Vol. II), of which Bloom had to have been aware when he wrote this. The following problems I have are more major. First, Bloom displays a strange ideological inconsistency throughout the book. I've already mentioned his hypocrisy when it comes to nihilism. But there's another point where he pointedly praises Goethe for bringing the active life to the forefront for the first time. Bloom celebrates Goethe's claim that DOING is superior to CONTEMPLATING, but he does this in the midst of one long, contemplative tome that has little to do with action. For that matter, every philosopher falls before this definition of superiority, a fact that Bloom ignores. How does Goethe's stance fit in with the rest of the Socratic philosophers that thought nothing was higher than thinking about truth and values?The inconsistency continues with respect to Bloom's praise of the creative and the creators, the artists, which he defines in Part Two as something truly rare. He clearly detests the fact that the word is so overused these days to describe what is unquestionably NOT creation. (This is during a diatribe on "language pollution" which I actually liked and agreed with.) During this section he casually disdains the scholars who merely study what other men created. Of course, he doesn't mention that he's doing the same thing: critiquing instead of creating. What exactly is he creating here? Same problem as the Goethe passage.Perhaps the thing that most bothered me about the book is that Bloom actually conflates the meaning of openness and closedness when elaborating on the title of his book. Try this passage from the introduction:If openness means to "go with the flow," it is necessarily an accomodation to the present. That present is so closed to doubt about so many things impeding the progress of its principles that unqualified openness to it would mean forgetting the despised alternatives to it, knowledge of which makes us aware of what is doubtful in it. True openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.(p.42, my emphasis)This quite miraculously turns what most objective bystanders would call Bloom's closed-minded conservatism into "openness." It's a rather neat trick, and even convincing unless you stop to think about it. Then you just think, "Wait a minute, that's not right at all." A more flagrant passage occurs toward the end of the book:In a democracy (the university) risks less by opposing the emergent, the changing and the ephemeral than by embracing them, because the society is already open to them, without monitoring what it accepts or sufficiently respecting the old. There the university risks less by having intransigently high standards than by trying to be too inclusive, because the society tends to blur standards in the name of equality. It also risks less by concentrating on the heroic than by looking to the commonplace, because the society levels. (p.253)Let me paraphrase since his lingo is a little difficult to follow: A truly open university must oppose everything progressive while upholding tradition and should only concern itself with the most brilliant students while ignoring mediocrity. (He is also claiming that universities are somehow behind the curve on what society accepts, which is ridiculous in its own right.) This is a very convenient position for a conservative elitist to take -- it amazingly reinforces with iron-clad logic every reactionary idea he stands for. That leads to the final problem I had with this book. Bloom adopts the Nietzchian angle that rationalists can't ultimately sustain their position, because all reason is fundamentally drawn from the irrational. At one point he says something to the effect of, "Reason is nothing more than an excuse for one's irrational desires/passions," so all rationalist positions are ultimately self-serving. Yet here he has presented us with a very reasoned argument for why conservatism needs to rule our universities. One must presume that he's aware of the logical implications -- that his own argument falls into the rationalist trap and is really nothing more than masturbatory self-congratulation -- but if he is, he never lets on. I wanted to rate this book lower just because I disagree with the author a fair amount of the time, but the book was so enjoyable that I couldn't help myself. And it definitely made me think, which I always value. Cross-posted at Not Bad Movie and Book Reviews.
Perhaps this book deserves five stars -- it did, after all, shake me up a bit, the way the best books do. Bloom is rightly concerned with a problem I see in my own classrooms: the assumption that, since all views are to be tolerated in our modern liberal democracy, all views are equally valuable; furthermore, since all ideas are equally worthy of consideration, none of them are worthy of consideration. It is difficult to say anything of real importance about poetry, literature, art, religion, philosophy, etc., because the arts and humanities have become matters of personal taste, which we regard as sacrosanct. This problem is exacerbated by a tepid vocabulary pervading our discourse: instead of "love," for example, one is more likely to speak of "commitment;" instead of ideal "virtues" we have arbitrary "values." Bloom argues that these words, and others like them, result from an impotence of ideas, issued from a university system that cannot articulate its own worth, or the worth of its subjects in the humanities. So, instead of the tolerant "openness" we assume to be good, we have "a great closing":Openness used to be the virtue permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognizing the inherent political, social, and cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless.It's easy to see why, as any Google search or Amazon review is likely to tell you, this book was popular with conservatives when it was published in 1987. Unfortunately, a critique of the liberal position that "accepts everything" sounds like the beginning of the type of socially conservative rant that blames, say, homosexuality or immigration or atheism for the endemic ills of our country -- a rant that ends, inevitably, with a call to “traditional values,” in particular those alleged to have been held by our Founders in their supposed intent to establish, above all other considerations, a Christian nation. A personal confession: it was impossible for me to read this book without hearing the echo of conservative and evangelical voices that would find legitimacy for their doctrine in Bloom’s argument.But this book cannot be conservative in the sense that we understand conservatism today. Yes, Bloom treats with disdain the sort of openness that questions nothing, the sort of openness that, by default, must regard reason as the enemy of choice, disregarding how any individual choice relates to the good. But Bloom explicitly desires and calls for a different kind of openness, an intellectually honest openness, an openness grounded in reason and real engagement with the tension between complex ideas. This tension is more important than any settled conclusion one might ultimately draw from the ideas that created it:Equality for us seems to culminate in the unwillingness and incapacity to make claims of superiority, particularly in the domains in which such claims have always been made—art, religion, and philosophy. When Weber found that he could not choose between certain high opposites—reason vs. revelation, Buddha vs. Jesus—he did not conclude that all things are equally good, that the distinction between high and low disappears. As a matter of fact he intended to revitalize the consideration of these great alternatives in showing the gravity and danger involved in choosing among them; they were to be heightened in contrast to the trivial considerations of modern life that threatened to overgrow and render indistinguishable the profound problems the confrontation with which makes the bow of the soul taut. The serious intellectual life was for him the battleground of the great decisions, all of which are spiritual or “value” choices. One can no longer present this or that particular view of the educated or civilized man as authoritative; therefore one must say that education consists in knowing, really knowing, the small number of such views in their integrity. [Italics mine]The religious right and conservatism in its most popular and perverse form fail, as much as relativistic forms of liberalism, to establish anything like tension or tautness within the soul of man: it’s all ideology (which Bloom dismisses as mere “prejudice”), an invasion of the spiritual and the religious by “quacks, adventures, cranks and fanatics.” If Bloom finds the post-Enlightenment retreat from Christianity troubling, it is not because he regards Christianity as an expression of ultimate truth, but because the retreat from religion into the embrace of the natural sciences was so complete that matters of the soul, the good, the ideal were vanquished. The Bible, in Bloom’s conception, is not a good book because it is Right, or because it conclusively presents an ultimate and indisputable Truth, but because people once found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfillment of their duty in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and ennobling past... When [graduates from modern universities] talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing by cliches, superficialities, the material of satire. I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics, and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.It seems to me that a good deal of conservative/religious discourse these days neglects a “respect for real learning” and consists instead of “superficialities” no better than those uttered in the name of liberal openness. All of this to say: the sort of conservatism from which Bloom argues leads away from what we might call contemporary conservatism—a system in which all of history and scripture serve merely to confirm one’s own prejudices, which are themselves unable to answer the problems of the soul, nature, and the good.Meanwhile, it feels old-fashioned to read such words and phrases: soul, virtue, eros, the good, etc. And yet one fears that without them, something in academic studies, particularly within the humanities, is missing. My own graduate school experience was, at times, a long descent into theory: we were to understand literature and poetry as expressions of, say, Lacanian psychoanalysis. There were many post-modernists in our group, an earnest handful of historicists, deconstructionists, and post-feminists, each asking a set of very particular questions. We were trained to become specialists within the field of literature, and though our pursuits were too narrow to have very much in common, there was one question we all considered anathema to serious literary studies: what did the author intend? No surprise, then, that Bloom considers it the most important question:The effort to read books as their writers intended them to be read has been made into a crime, ever since the “intentional fallacy” was instituted. There are endless debates about methods -- among Freudian criticism, Marxist criticism, New Criticism, Structuralism and Deconstructionism, and many others, all of which have in common the premise that what Plato or Dante had to say about reality is unimportant. These schools of criticism make the writers plants in a garden planned by a modern scholar, while their own garden-planning vocation is denied them. The writers ought to plant, or even bury, the scholar.Though Bloom’s book was a bestseller in 1987, the state of the humanities does not appear much improved – just this weekend I read about “the growing field of digital humanities,” in which students search massive databases of literary texts to find patterns in language. It may no longer be necessary to actually read literature, to understand how writers spoke to the big questions, and to each other, or what they actually had to say: now, students can use “computational methods to zero in on the places in ‘Paradise Lost’ where John Milton is alluding to the Latin of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid.’” Elsewhere in the university, the field of neuroaesthetics -- a combination of literary and neurology studies -- uses literature to map the brain, to discover which “underlying mental processes are activated when we read.” The author is dead, the text is dead, and what the university now values in literature or philosophy is not anything so quaint as ideas or reason or even imagination, but the measurement of electrical impulses in our own brains. Self-knowledge begins with the neuron, not the soul. The natural sciences, Bloom might say, with regret but not surprise, have triumphed utterly over the humanities.This seems like so much intellectual and spiritual gloom and doom, but reading The Closing of the American Mind was, for me, invigorating, partly because Bloom makes such a compelling case for reading, or rereading, classic works by their own lights -- I found myself tossing titles by Rousseau, Tocqueville, Locke, Plato, Aristophanes and others onto my Amazon wish list -- and partly because his concerns are likely to inform how I teach my own literature classes.(Parenthetically: I deducted one star from this review because a good number of pages in Bloom’s argument are devoted to the idea that an academic misreading of Nietzsche contributed to an academic misunderstanding of Plato and Aristotle, resulting in a relativism of the humanities that was exported to the culture at large. This was hard to follow, and my paraphrase may be mangled, but I suspect that, even if I had understood its nuances, this line of thinking is not the argumentative keystone Bloom seems to think is it.)
Do You like book The Closing Of The American Mind (1988)?
an analylitical look at the culture that is modern western society. our society as seen through the eyes of his 40+ years as a professor at an elite university and the degradation of mankind in the west (with plenty to say about the rest of the world, too). doesn't sound too compelling, but unlike the other half-million books on this subject, bloom's insights are at once intellectually honest, relevant and, at times, stunning. bloom dares you to reason with him. here he had placed political correctness and moral relativism on trial before the concepts were even catch-phrases in modern pop-culture.
—Richard
One hundred pages into the book, I picked up a penand began a serious dialogue with this book. I especially found the parts on Nietzsche and Freud important in regard to their impact on American culture. At one point Bloom made the statement that Freud pulled the rug out from under our feet and the elevator plunged bottomlessly down into the psyche. I think this is really apparent in a lot of postmodern and contemporary literature where there is a lot of soul searching and digging through the family tree towards the roots. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Sam Shepard's Buried Child are but two examples which illustrate this preoccupation. Bloom really brought me to thinking about literature and its underlying philosophical base especially in regard to our contemporary culture. The Road by McCarthy an be read as an allegorical representation of Plato's Cave where the detritus of culture cannot be communicated effectively from generation to generation. Obviously, Bloom gives a critique of higher education and I have mixed feelings seeing that multiculturalism won out in higher education.
—Shane
When it comes to the contemporary study of Western decline, there is hardly a tome that compares with Allan Bloom's tour de force, "The Closing of the American Mind." Writing in the mid 1980s, he skillfully unravels the knot of factors that have contributed to the current malaise. Nothing escapes his scalpel: feminism, narcissism, affirmative action, cultural relativism, and the collapse of academia are all sliced and diced, exposed in their entire historical and ideological depth.Bloom (1930-1992) fought on the cultural front lines, teaching in the social sciences at some of the most prestigious American universities, including Cornell, Yale, and the University of Chicago. His testimony regarding the transformation of the student body is sobering:"Today's select students know so much less, are so much more cut off from the tradition, are so much slacker intellectually, that they make their predecessors look like prodigies of culture. The soil is ever thinner, and I doubt whether it can now sustain the taller growths."The students he dealt with at those elite institutions were the opinion-makers of the future, who would later set the tone for the nation's cultural life. His "today's students" are, in 2008, entrenched in academia, the arts, industry, the media, etc. They justify Bloom's pessimism; it is now clear that the "taller growths" could not be sustained.A theme that runs through the book is the evaporation of the critical spirit. Academics have distanced themselves from evaluation of ideas based on timeless, universal criteria derived from man's faculty of reason. In the past, Western thinkers were open to discussing diverse ideas and cultures, but with the intent of criticizing them. They sifted and compared and appraised, in order to separate the good from the bad.Now, with the critical spirit in ruins, one is pressured to be open to all ideas and cultures equally. The evaluation stage is omitted. This has had a disastrous effect:"Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognizing the inherent political, social, or cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless....Openness to closedness is what we teach."Bloom observed that the students had become detached from the great works of literature. These works, based as they are on the critical spirit, have no relevant message in the new amorphous intellectual environment. The students are intelligent, they can read, they can analyze a text, but their upbringing and early education leave them without the experience of strong attachment to a great book.A person who has had such an experience can re-experience it many times during a lifelong quest for cultural enrichment. But without it, the great books (as well as the great works of art) become virtually inaccessible. A generation earlier, writes Bloom, students were at least familiar with the Bible, which provided some ground on which an appreciation of literature could be constructed. When families ceased to transmit this basic heritage, not to speak of the great works in the arts and sciences, a cornerstone of the intellectual edifice crumbled."The cause of the decay of the family's traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth. So books have become, at best, "culture," i.e., boring. As Tocqueville put it, in a democracy tradition is nothing more than information. With the 'information explosion,' tradition has become superfluous....In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and--as the very model for a vision of the order of the whole of things, as well as the key to the rest of Western art, the greatest works of which were in one way or another responsive to the Bible--provided access to the seriousness of books. With its gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing."Bloom's deconstruction of feminism includes an interesting analysis of how it interacted with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The sexual revolution liberated nature, whereas feminism attempted to crush and manipulate nature for its own ends. It constituted a return (with a vengeance) to the old regime of repression and restrictions, but of course with a new twist:"Male sexual passion has become sinful again because it culminates in sexism. Women are made into objects, they are raped by their husbands as well as by strangers, they are sexually harassed by professors and employers at school and at work, and their children, whom they leave in day-care centers in order to pursue their careers, are sexually abused by teachers. All these crimes must be legislated against and punished. What sensitive male can avoid realizing how dangerous his sexual passion is? Is there perhaps really original sin? The new interference with sexual desire is more comprehensive, more intense, more difficult to escape than the older conventions, the grip of which was so recently relaxed. The July 14 of the sexual revolution was really only a day between the overthrow of the Ancien Régime and the onset of the Terror."A good chunk of the book is a voyage through the history of Western thought, to determine the roots of the eventual collapse of the intellect in general, and the study of the humanities and social sciences in particular. Bloom does a masterful job of treating complex themes in a coherent and readable manner. This includes a discussion of the problems peculiar to liberal democracies, with their tendency to venerate equality and utility. This poses a terrible difficulty for the university, which must struggle to preserve detached pursuit of the truth, carried out by the scholar, or "theoretical type," as Bloom calls him. This is someone who can see across time and space, offering us insights that are not tainted by the ebb and flow of public opinion and political expediency.Today, the theoretical type is on the brink of extinction, especially--irony of ironies--in the university, the one place established to protect and nurture it. There has been an "egalitarian resentment against the higher type...deforming and interpreting it out of existence." The man of reason, the true scholar, is under siege:"Marxism and Freudianism reduce his motives to those all men have. Historicism denies him access to eternity. Value theory makes his reasoning irrelevant. If he were to appear, our eyes would be blind to his superiority, and we would be spared the discomfort it would cause us."I conclude with a passage on the relationship between freedom of thought and tyranny, which rings true in our day, as the vise of politically-correct thought control tightens its grip:"Freedom of mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside."
—Gary
