Allan Bloom and America
The Closing of the American Mind
Allan Bloom
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987
Reviewed by Thomas G. West
Allan Bloom
introduced me to the study of political philosophy in three
fine courses at Cornell in the mid-1960s. For that I will
always be grateful. Political philosophy has been decisive
for my life, just as it is for Bloom’s. Yet I am about
to criticize Bloom’s new book. I do not wish to be
ungrateful. I offer my criticism in the spirit of
Bloom’s teacher and mine, Leo Strauss, and in the spirit
of those classical political philosophers whose writings
Bloom and Strauss have pointed us to throughout their
careers. I mean to practice what Bloom preached.
The
Closing of the American Mind is a diagnosis of the
intellectual ills of our day, and, if it is not a
prescription, it contains at least some suggestions for a
cure. The book is most sound, I will argue, in its
description of current pathologies. It is partly sound,
partly unsound in its account of their origin. It is least
sound in its prescription for their healing.
Bloom
begins by examining the students in our prestige
universities, and he finds them deficient in moral formation,
in reading of serious books, in musical tastes, and above all
in eros. They have no love in their souls, no longing for
anything high or great. Their minds are empty, their
characters weak, and their bodies sated with rock and roll
and easy sex. These students come equipped with a
simple-minded relativism that is quick to close off all
discussion with the tag, "Who’s to say what’s
right and wrong?" Their relativism justifies an
easygoing openness to everything, an openness which expresses
their incapacity for being serious about anything. Their
proclaimed openness, in fact, turns out to be a dogmatic
closedness toward moral virtue no less than toward real
thoughtfulness. They are "spiritually detumescent."
Toward the
end of the book Bloom turns to their teachers, who are even
worse than the students. They carry on the routine of
education out of habit and as a job. When it came to the
crunch during the so-called student unrest of the 1960s, they
collapsed, because they believed in no principles that would
justify resistance to the barbarians. And so the left-wing
thugs took over Cornell without opposition.
The cause
of our current malaise, in Bloom’s diagnosis, is modern
philosophy, which has infected us in two ways—through
politics and through 19th and 20th century continental
European thought. As for politics, America was founded on
modern principles of liberty and equality which we got from
Hobbes and Locke. Liberty turned out to mean freedom from all
self-restraint, and equality turned out to mean the
destruction of all differences of rank and even of nature.
Our Founders may have acted, or have pretended to act,
"with a firm reliance on divine providence"
(Declaration of Independence) but their natural-rights
philosophy came from the atheists Hobbes and Locke. (Bloom
hedges on whether the Founders were self-conscious atheists
or merely the dupes of clever and lying philosophers.) Bloom
characterizes the Lockean doctrine of the Founders in this
way:
[In the
state of nature man] is on his own. God neither looks
after him nor punishes him. Nature’s indifference to
justice is a terrible bereavement for
man. . . . [This state of nature doctrine]
produced, among other wonders, the United States. (163)
The
practical result:
God was
slowly executed here; it took two hundred years, but
local theologians tell us He is now dead. (230)
Similarly,
the Founders may have thought they were establishing a
political order based on reason—Bloom stresses our
initial claim to being the first political order so
grounded—but the regime of reason turned out to be the
regime where reason discovers the virtue of unleashing the
passions. At first reason legitimates only the modest
passions of industriousness and money-making. But having
abandoned its older claim to be the rightful master of the
soul, reason eventually lost its authority and became
impotent against demands for self-indulgence and mindless
self-expression. The story of America, according to Bloom, is
a tale of the practical working out of the degradation
inherent in the logic of our founding principles:
This is
a regime founded by philosophers and their
students. . . . Our story is the majestic
and triumphant march of the principles of freedom and
equality, giving meaning to all that we have done or are
doing. There are almost no accidents; everything that
happens among us is a consequence of one or both of our
principles. . . . [T]he problem of nature
[is] always present but always repressed in the
reconstruction of man demanded by freedom and equality.
(97)
Eventually,
Bloom says, the infections occasioned by our political
principles sapped the strength of religious faith and
traditional morality. The relativism of today’s students
is, then, in Bloom’s view, a perfect expression of the
real soul of liberty, which from the start, in Hobbes’s
thought, meant that life had no intrinsic meaning. The
anti-nature dogmas of women’s liberation, which deny the
obvious natural differences between men and women in the name
of equality, are destroying the last remnants of the family,
which had been the core of society through most of
America’s history. Likewise, the anti-nature dogmas of
affirmative action—insisting that equal opportunity be
suppressed until all categories of Americans come out exactly
the same—deny the obvious natural differences among
human beings in regard to ambition and intelligence.
Thus
equality and liberty eventually produced self-satisfied
relativism which sees no need to aspire to anything beyond
itself—"spiritual detumescence." They also
produced left-wing political movements which try to implement
the "reconstruction of man demanded by freedom and
equality" and which not only threaten but dominate
important parts of our leading universities. Further,
Hobbesian-Lockean liberty was also designed to liberate
scientific technology in order to conquer nature and make
life comfortable. The very idea of a conquest of nature
implies disrespect for natural limits and has contributed to
the decline of respect for nature’s guidance in all
areas of contemporary life.
The second
cause of our problems today, Bloom tells us, is post-Lockean
modern philosophy. The big names are Rousseau, Nietzsche, and
Heidegger, but their views have been popularized (and
degraded) by such men as Marx, Freud, and Max Weber. Their
ideas have worked their way into our universities and our
speech, giving us "The Self,"
"Creativity," "Culture," and
"Values" (four of Bloom’s chapter titles).
These continental writers, more radical than Hobbes and
Locke, all strongly denounced "bourgeois society,"
i.e., democracy American style. From them we have learned to
think of ourselves as despicably low. Yet at the same time,
we have vulgarized the grand conceptions of especially
Rousseau and Nietzsche and fitted them into our own
democratic prejudices. Thus every nursery-school child is
encouraged to be "creative."
If I may
elaborate on Bloom’s analysis and follow out my own
medical analogy, America’s founding principles, taken
from Hobbes and Locke, may be compared to the AIDS virus. The
body into which AIDS insinuates itself may continue to appear
healthy for many years before the symptoms reveal themselves.
Thus, although our founding principles were atheistic and
relativistic at bottom, the body politic continued to look
healthy for about 180 years before the disease began to
manifest itself openly.
The AIDS
virus renders the body helpless before the attack of
infectious diseases. It destroys the body’s ability to
distinguish good from evil viruses and opens it up to the
penetration of evil. AIDS is the body’s relativism, the
self-destructive openness of the body’s mind. Similarly,
an AIDS-infected American mind loses its ability to tell the
difference between healthful and harmful opinions. Salutary
customs and traditions, such as moral self-restraint and the
habits and attitudes necessary for sustaining family life,
for seriousness of purpose, and ultimately for national
survival, become indistinguishable from life-destroying
doctrines and beliefs, such as the hostile teachings of 19th
and 20th century German philosophy. The American mind,
suffering from Hobbes-Locke induced AIDS—a liberty that
has no respect for nature and natural limits—therefore
not only fails to resist the destructive infection of
Nietzsche-Heidegger, but with its false openness the American
mind mindlessly welcomes the infection, thus bringing on what
may be the terminal stage of the disease.1
Bloom also
prescribes a cure for our malady. The cure is Great Books
education in the prestige universities, taught in the spirit
of opening students up to the charms and challenge of
"the philosophic experience." Of course Bloom is
not so naive as to think that reading a few good old books
will transform American political and intellectual life. He
means that this sort of reading might help in restoring some
sort of seriousness to education and therefore to life. Bloom
readily acknowledges that this is a slender hope.
* * *
I myself cannot subscribe to
Bloom’s diagnosis of the problems of American education,
although I do subscribe to the general features of his
account of modern relativism and its dangers.
I can sum
up my main objection in this way: Far from being the source
of the problem, or an important source of it, America’s
founding principles are for us probably the only basis for
its solution; far from being the equivalent of mental AIDS,
our principles are our immune system. Bloom is of
course right when he says that Hobbes’s notion of
liberty cannot distinguish itself from license. He is right
that there can be no principled objection on the basis of
Hobbes’s doctrine to a government-sponsored effort to
make men and women the same. Indeed, as is well known, there
is in Hobbes’s thought no principled objection to
tyranny altogether, tyranny being nothing more than monarchy
misliked, and monarchy being the form of government
recommended by Leviathan. But the American Founders
were not Hobbesians, however often Bloom and his students and
friends may repeat the falsehood that they were.
The
Founders had a low opinion of Hobbes. James Wilson, one of
the two or three most important men at the Constitutional
Convention of 1787, once summed up his assessment of Hobbes
by asserting that Hobbes’s "narrow and
hideous" theories are "totally repugnant to all
human sentiment, and all human experience." Wilson says
this in the context of affirming Lockean ideas about the
natural rights of man. Similarly, Alexander Hamilton, in The
Farmer Refuted, attributed Hobbes’s principles to
the Tory Samuel Seabury.
His
[Hobbes’s] opinion was, exactly, coincident with
yours [Seabury’s], relative to man in a state of
nature. He held, as you do, that he [man] was then
perfectly free from the restraint of law and government.
Moral obligation, according to him, is derived from the
introduction of civil society; and there is no virtue,
but what is purely artificial, the mere contrivance of
politicians, for the maintenance of social intercourse.
But the reason he ran into this absurd and impious
doctrine was that he disbelieved the existence of an
intelligent superintending principle, who is the governor
and will be the final judge of the universe.
. . .
To grant that there is a supreme intelligence who rules
the world and has established laws to regulate the
actions of his creatures; and still, to assert, that man,
in a state of nature, may be considered as perfectly free
from all restraints of law and government, appear to a
common understanding, altogether irreconcilable.
Good
and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very
dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity,
from the relations, we stand in, to himself and to each
other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law,
which is, indispensably, obligatory upon all
mankind, prior to any human institution whatever.
This is
what is called the law of nature. . . . Upon
this law, depend the natural rights of mankind. . . .
(Emphasis added.)
The key
point is that Hamilton, as did the other Founders, integrated
Lockean language into a moral framework they had inherited
from classical and medieval political philosophy and from
their manly Protestantism. Nature and nature’s God were
the ultimate source of duty and right.
Against
Hamilton, Bloom asserts, without the slightest attempt to
prove it, that for Americans rights precede duties as a
matter of course. He implies that Hamilton is wrong about the
state of nature, that the law of nature has no moral content,
and that there is in America an abandonment from the start of
any idea of duty or purpose in life beyond personal whims or
commitments.
But in
modern political regimes [such as America], where rights
precede duties, freedom definitely has primacy over
community, family, and even nature. (113)
Bloom also
says the enlightenment views of Hobbes and Locke were meant
to liberate men "from God’s tutelage" (163).
Thus Bloom attributes to America, and America’s
Founders, a view that Hamilton went out of his way to
denounce as typical of the immoral Tory position!
Solzhenitsyn understood our founding better when he said,
"In American democracy at the time of its birth, all
individual human rights were granted because man is
God’s creature. ["All men are created
equal."] That is, freedom was given to the individual
conditionally, on the assumption of his constant religious
responsibility. . . . We have lost the concept
of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our
passions and our irresponsibility." Bloom and I would
agree that men today have forgotten God. But why accuse
Hamilton, Washington, even Jefferson of things manifestly
untrue?
Jefferson:
Can the
liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have
removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds
of the people that these liberties are of the gift of
God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?
Washington,
far from viewing the Enlightenment as a challenge to
religion, saw religion as contribution to true enlightenment!
The
foundation of our empire was not laid in the gloomy age
of ignorance and superstition, but at an epocha when the
rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly
defined than at any former period. . . . [A]bove all, the
pure and benign light of revelation ha[s] had a
meliorating influence on mankind and increased the
blessings of society. At this auspicious period, the
United States came into existence as a nation, and if
their citizens should not be completely free and happy,
the fault will be entirely their own.
Similarly,
Bloom mistakes the Founders’ view of human nature,
attributing to them a break with the classic view of man as a
combination of reason and passion:
In the
past it was thought that man is a dual being, one part of
him concerned with the common good, the other with
private interests. To make politics work, man, it was
thought, has to overcome the selfish part of himself, to
tyrannize over the merely private, to be virtuous. Locke
. . . taught that no part of man is naturally
directed to the common good and that the old way was both
excessively harsh and ineffective, that it went against
the grain. They experimented with using private interest
for public interest, putting natural freedom ahead of
austere virtue. (166-67)
On the
contrary, the Founders always understood that "man is a
dual being." The Federalist speaks of man
throughout as both rational and passionate:
Why has
government been instituted at all? Because the passions
of men will not conform to the dictates of reason without
constraint.
It is true
of course that the Founders paid close attention to the
problem of self-interest, and that they did everything they
could to channel self-interest in the direction of the common
good. (Plato, Aristotle, and all the classic writers on
politics recommended similar devices linking self-interest to
the common good, to "supply the defect of better
motives.") But the Founders were far from indulging the
Kantian delusion that a well-constructed constitution would
work even for a nation of devils. This delusion is, to be
sure, typical of those post-Rousseau Continental thinkers who
abandoned human nature as the standard of political life.
Hamilton once explicitly denounced it when he said, "It
is always very dangerous to look to the vices of men for
good."
The
Founders were well aware of the need for public-spirited
citizens. They anticipated with clarity the consequence of a
loss of public virtue. They believed that a people accustomed
to living however it pleased, who saw no higher purpose than,
say, entertainment and having fun—a people incapable of self-government
in the sense of controlling selfish passions and
interests—would also be incapable of self-government
in the sense of democracy, making public laws for themselves
to live by. As Madison says in The Federalist:
Republican
government presupposes the existence of these qualities
[men’s capacity for virtue] in a higher degree than
any other form [of government].
But if a
people ever becomes slavishly lacking in self-restraint, if
their "spirit shall ever be so far debased," they
"will be prepared to tolerate anything but
liberty."
The
students described by Bloom in the first part of his book are
indeed approaching the debased character which Madison
feared. But it is not true that our Founders’ principles
and institutions sowed what we are now reaping. It can be
shown, as I have done in "The Founders’ View of
Education," that they in fact did everything they could
to form the character of the people to make them
self-assertive, self-controlled republicans. For the moment I
will merely mention John Adams’ educational provisions
in the Massachusetts Constitution, the surprisingly strict
laws regulating the public morals passed in those years by
state legislatures, and the intention of the U. S.
Constitution to rectify "an almost universal prostration
of morals" caused by irresponsible actions of the
several state governments which had "undermined the
foundations of property and credit."
I could go
on quoting the Founders—an exercise that might be useful
for readers of Bloom’s book, since he rarely if ever
quotes Americans on America, but limits himself to the
pronouncements of foreigners, such as Hobbes, Locke, and
Tocqueville (I almost included Saul Bellow). Instead, I will
mention the one fact that is the most convincing piece of
evidence to me about the source of America’s current
difficulties. If you look at the history of those changes in
American education of which Bloom so justly complains, you
find that those changes were always introduced by men who
knew they were at odds with the people and the politicians
who were formed by the Founders’ principles. Those
intellectuals who have been promoting for many decades the
relativistic, anti-natural, and leftist dogmas prevailing
today all hated the principles of the founding and most of
them said so openly and loudly. Their work could only go
forward after the Founders’ view of natural right and
natural law had been discredited.
The first
sustained attack on the founding principles was launched in
the South before the Civil War by slaveholders and their
apologists who wanted to get rid of natural rights so they
could be free to continue to tyrannize over their slaves.
During the progressivist era there was a sustained
denunciation of the founding, especially of the Constitution,
and Woodrow Wilson among others attacked the Founders’
views and institutions because, based as they were on the
idea of individual rights, they stood in the way of massive
state control of private life. More recently we have been
subjected to constant vilifications of religion and morality
in American life—Bloom mentions that nothing is less
controversial in the prestige universities than such
attacks—and these attacks have consistently included
attacks on the idea of natural law and natural right.
But Bloom
argues that the barbaric attacks on America in the 1960s were
really a product of America itself, the unintended
culmination of a doomed enlightenment enterprise.
The
content of this morality [viz., that of the ’60s at
Cornell] was derived simply from the leading notions of
modern democratic thought, absolutized and radicalized.
Equality, freedom, peace, cosmopolitanism were the goods,
the only goods. . . . They were inherent
in our regime, they constituted its horizon. (326)
He makes
this argument because he sees no principled distinction
between liberty and equality as the Founders conceived them
and liberty and equality as, say, Marx conceived them. In
other words, since Bloom does not see the much more
traditional character—and that means the rational
character—of the Founders’ view of liberty, he
mistakes the source of the problem. Instead of debunking the
founding (Bloom once rightly blamed a history teacher of his
for this very thing), Bloom should be celebrating it as a
fund of wisdom to be recovered for the sake of the very
enterprise he wishes to foster. And instead of confusing the
issue by speaking of Marxism as an extreme version of
American egalitarianism, he should be vigorously denouncing
Marxist hatred of political liberty, liberal education, and
religion, the bulwarks of American constitutionalism.
Bloom’s
mistake about America proceeds, I believe, from two sources.
First, he simply doesn’t know much about America’s
origins. His own studies have been in the history of European
political philosophy and European literature. And, not having
studied America much himself, he has relied heavily, almost
exclusively, on the facts that John Locke is America’s
philosopher, and that John Locke was a secret admirer and
follower of Thomas Hobbes. But it is not possible to move
from these facts to an account of America’s founding
that pays little or no attention to the actual writings and
documents produced by the Founders themselves. For the
question is, in what sense were the Founders Lockeans?
Their writings show without doubt that the Founders’
understanding of their own actions was entirely contrary to
the deepest intention of the deeply radical Hobbes and Locke.
The history
of modern political philosophy does have a logic of its own,
as Leo Strauss has convincingly shown, which leads to
increasingly radical statements culminating with Nietzsche in
the denial of reason and philosophy itself. But intellectual
history is not political history. As Charles Kesler once
said, America is not just another chapter in the
Strauss-Cropsey History of Political Philosophy.2
But there
is a second reason for Bloom’s mistake about America,
and that stems from his own experience and taste. Bloom
acknowledges that he never felt at home in the American
midwest of his youth, that there was nothing for him in the
concerns of his high school classmates (244), nor in the
piety of his orthodox grandfather (60). But when he arrived
at the University of Chicago, he says, and saw its
pseudo-Gothic towers, "[he] somehow sensed that [he] had
discovered [his] life" (243). He implies that he knew he
had discovered it before he ever met his master Leo Strauss
there, and I can believe it. Bloom is describing himself as
an uprooted intellectual for whom traditional religion and
"bourgeois society" mean nothing. For such a man,
what incentive is there to study America with any sympathy?
Far from being the land of the free and the home of the
brave, the American Republic was for him a dreary desert from
which he longed to escape. His oasis was the university, the
Republic of Letters, and there he has stayed ever since. Of
course he is very interested in America as it comes to sight
through the students he teaches and the university that gives
him his home. But everything outside the university, Bloom
implies, is philistine, bourgeois, and contemptibly vulgar.
Consider the snobbishness of this typical remark of his:
"The importance of these [university] years for an
American cannot be overestimated. They are
civilization’s only chance to get to him."
Is
civilization only to be found in or through universities?
Considering Bloom’s own relentless indictment, one
wonders whether civilization is to be found at all in the
"best" universities (the only exception being an
isolated, often embattled, teacher here or there). Why does
Bloom not look to certain less prominent but more substantial
colleges, where the trends he describes have sometimes been
resisted more successfully than at the better-known
institutions? Or, to put it more radically, why should we
respect the modern university at all? If Bloom’s story
of its internal decay is true, as I am inclined to believe,
it seems much more likely that, if civilization is to be
preserved, it will be in spite of our universities, not
because of them.
Tocqueville,
an authority on America whom Bloom admires, would never have
suggested that universities are our access to civilization
(even in 1835, when they were so much sounder than today).
Indeed, Tocqueville and Bloom differ profoundly in other ways
as well. To exaggerate for clarity’s sake: Tocqueville
never stops celebrating the virtues of small-town life in
America, with its strong Protestantism, its tight moralism,
its close-knit families, and its human-scale democracy, while
Bloom seems to value all this only as the source of strong
prejudices the liberation from which will be all the more
satisfying as Bloom midwifes it. Otherwise Bloom seems ready
to chime in with the Rousseau-Nietzsche condemnation of
bourgeois life.
In this
respect, without intending it, he is in agreement with, for
example, the recent opponents of Judge Robert Bork, who
(unlike Bloom) want to replace the America of equal
opportunity and moral self-restraint with a society of forced
egalitarianism. In such a society, liberty will be abolished
in favor of a false conception of equality (it is already in
the course of being abolished), and the kind of education
which Bloom praises will disappear.
* * *
This leads to Bloom’s
prescription for a cure to our ills. It centers on the
university. Bloom is firmly against the idea that the
university should serve society. In this he opposes the
Founders, particularly Washington, Adams, and Jefferson.
Jefferson’s conception of university education was
public-spirited. The main intent is "to form the
statesmen, legislators, and judges, on whom public prosperity
and individual happiness are so much to depend." This is
to be done by studies in "the principles and structure
of government." "Political economy" is to be
learned in order to promote the public industry. Students are
also to be enlightened with "mathematical and physical
sciences, which advance the arts, and administer to the
health, the subsistence, and comforts of human life."
Finally, the university is to "develop their reasoning
faculties" and "enlarge their minds, cultivate
their morals, and instill into them the precepts of virtue
and order." All of this is in order "to form them
to habits of reflection and correct actions, rendering them
examples of virtue to others, and of happiness within
themselves."
Bloom’s
university, on the other hand, is to be explicitly devoted to
cultivating the philosophic life, by pointing students away
from their own countries and traditions. But in the current
climate, which is already all too willing to question the
value of American society and government, would this
orientation not tend to ossify the prevailing prejudices?
Nietzsche, one of Bloom’s authorities on the current
malaise, rightly points out the debilitating effect of Great
Books education in our world (in a passage I first read
during a course I took with Bloom at Cornell in 1965): such
an education, says Nietzsche, promotes accumulation of
knowledge of other times and places, without providing a
direction. "It is not a real education but a kind of
knowledge about education, a complex of various thoughts and
feelings about it, from which no decision about its direction
can come." In healthier times, education in the best
writings of the past is not for the sake of objective
consideration, but "always has a reference to the end of
life, and is under its absolute rule and direction" (Use
and Disadvantage of History for Life, sec. 4). Bloom
would agree, but he makes the end of life
"philosophy," forgetting, it seems, the lesson of
the philosophers that all human beings except philosophers
need a moral and political orientation. Without that, a
Bloomian education will produce not Socrateses but pale
shadows of Socrates—intellectuals.3
Bloom is
not indifferent to the needs of society. His final paragraph
suggests that a return to the classics may also have a
decisive effect on "the fate of freedom in the
world." But Bloom would make the public mission of the
university anti-social or rather trans-social, any benefit to
society being an accidental by-product, while Jefferson and I
would make its public mission primarily political, allowing
"the philosophic experience" to be cultivated
without official sanction.
Is not
Jefferson’s university closer to what Nietzsche, Plato,
and indeed anyone of common sense, would consider appropriate
for the future leaders of society, not to mention future
philosophers? His university would certainly accommodate the
chance philosopher in one niche or other of the curriculum.
But does it really make sense to attempt to go beyond this,
to institutionalize an education to the philosophic life in a
conventional academic structure? In the end it is who happens
to be teaching and who happens to be learning that will make
all the difference. Philosophers, like Caesars, can appear
anywhere, and they can take care of themselves. The attempt
to plan for them seems to me to betray a tendency on
Bloom’s part to equate, against the letter of his
intention, the philosopher and the intellectual. Finally, is
it really philistine to structure the university with a view
to service to society, above all in attempting to educate
future statesmen in the principles of republican government,
but on a lesser scale training men and women to be useful to
their society and to themselves? That is something that can
be understood and done well by those who are far from the
exalted heights of philosophy. As Rousseau, another of
Bloom’s authorities, reminds us, "He who will be a
bad versifier or a subaltern geometer all his life would
perhaps have become a great cloth maker."
The best
and most accurate parts of The Closing of the American
Mind are the beginning and end, those parts that deal
directly with university life in modern America. That is what
Bloom knows best because he has been immersed in it and has
observed it closely since his youth. Bloom spends a lot of
time with students and professors, and he has a gift for
penetrating their facades and seeing what they are really
like. The observations in these pages of the book, which are
of course deliberately and delightfully exaggerated, reveal
in the most memorable way the tendency of American young
people and of university education. Particularly good are the
sections on the debilitating effect of divorce on children
and on their capacity to learn and love, on the sad
consequences of affirmative action on black students, on the
loveless love lives of so many students, and on the
tremendous importance of rock and roll for young people and
how it degrades their souls.
Here is
where the book is strongest, and this is what seems to have
made the book a best-seller. It is from these pages, at any
rate, that the quotations in the reviews seem to come.
However, this may not be as hopeful a sign as Bloom,
according to an interview, seems to think. About ten years
ago, a highly popular book, The Culture of Narcissism,
was written by Christopher Lasch, reputedly a Marxist. I have
heard that this was Jimmy Carter’s favorite book. At any
rate Carter is said to have used it in preparing his famous
"energy crisis" speech, which spoke of our national
malaise. The point of the speech was to promote the creation
of yet another federal bureaucracy, this one to administer
the country’s energy policy from Washington. Much of
Lasch’s description of America’s ills bears a
striking similarity to Bloom’s, at least superficially.
(I counted at least fifteen parallel observations.) Like
Bloom, Lasch pounds away at the principle of individual
liberty and blames a good deal of our malaise on that
principle. Considering Lasch’s leftist political
orientation, however, one wonders how much of the praise of
Bloom’s book, particularly by the critics, who are
almost all liberals, comes from those hostile to liberal
democracy and constitutional government.
Someone
might ask, why are you being so hard on a book that might do
a lot of good, written by the man who happens to be the one
who introduced you to the study of political philosophy? To
compare small things to great, Aristotle set the example in
his treatment of his former teacher Plato. Truth comes before
friendship, though it need not destroy friendship. It seems
to me that Bloom’s low view of America, and the
consequent turning away from any serious political concern in
his conception of American education, vitiates the good
effect of his book’s sound parts.
Because he
feels so much at home with intellectuals, Bloom overlooks
politics. He is therefore unable to appreciate that the cause
of sound education in this country is much more likely to be
supported by "bourgeois" politicians than by
sophisticated intellectuals. Bloom has contempt for those
politicians. But it was not the Nixons of America who
capitulated to the Cornell blacks in the 1960s. Certainly
Nixon’s response would have been quite different from
that of Bloom’s students, who expressed their sovereign
contempt for those thugs by passing out xeroxes of passages
from Plato’s Republic (332). That impotent
gesture did nothing to save Cornell from barbarism. But for
Richard Nixon, one of the few public men willing to act
against the tide in those mad years (and their madness is
still with us), Bloom has only a sneer (329).
NOTES
1.
The idea that America was
AIDS-ridden from the start was suggested by Judge Robert
Bork: American constitutional law seems to be
"pathologically lacking in immune defenses" against
"the intellectual fevers of the general society." (Tradition
and Morality in Constitutional Law [Washington: American
Enterprise Institute, 1984], quoted in Harry V. Jaffa,
"Equality and the Founding," presented at the
Conference on Equality and the Constitution, San Bernardino
State University, April 1985.) Bork’s position is even
more radical than Bloom’s: Bork believes that there is
no theory at all inherent in our political institutions. But
the result is the same: "our constitutional law [is]
constantly catching cold" from the most radical
intellectual opinions of the day. Bork then goes on,
incoherently, to celebrate the fact that our
Constitution has no theory of its own!
2. Kesler is the
author of the best review of Bloom’s book published to
date: See The American Spectator, August 1987, pp.
14-17. Several of the arguments in the present review are
anticipated in Kesler’s.
3. Sanderson Schaub
raised this point against Eva Brann’s similar
endorsement of the St. John’s College curriculum in her Paradoxes
of Education in a Republic: See Independent Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 4, p. 177.
