vicfar's Full Review: Allan Bloom - The Closing of the American Mind
Allan Bloom wrote this book about the American educational system in 1987, and it quickly became a best-seller. I remember reading it then, and being impressed by it. I just gave it another read, in the occasion of my son's college graduation, to help me with my reflections on the value and quality of college education in the Western world.
Bloom is a conservative arm-chair professor, but not a conservative in the mold of today's aberrations like a Limbaugh, or a Buchanan, but a man who has truly come to grips with the philosophical underpinnings of our society, and mourns the decay of a brilliant democratic tradition into the spectacle of banality, superficiality and stupidity that constitutes the landscape of American society today. Whether you are a liberal or a conservative, you will be most likely offended by some passages of this book, which is blunt and extremely powerful. Bloom is not a man that can easily be dismissed, because he is learned, articulate, and his ideas are solid and powerful. As an old-fashioned conservative, his critique of modern society is not especially original. He certainly does not have the originality of a Foucault or a Lyotard, to name two great French intellectuals who have critiqued modern capitalism from a post-modern, thought-provoking angle, and for whom Bloom has nothing but loathing. His book is the rant of an elitist, who simply mourns the demise of intellectual life in modern America.
Bloom's view is that great American universities were modeled after the European colleges, and America was the ideal heir to the intellectual tradition of Europe. All this heredity has been squandered by misguided liberals and has been replaced by an empty "openness" that simply betrays the ignorance of one's own traditions. And a society cannot function - claims Bloom - without a shared vision of the public good.
The book consists of about 400 pages divided into three sections (1. Students.2.Nihilism, American Style.3. The University); the style is rather uneven and, at times, a little foggy, but with moments of sheer brilliance. What I like about Bloom is his uncompromising bluntness. He can be extremely effective when he hits the mark, and incredibly maddening when he insults great European intellectuals, like Sartre, Camus, Marcuse and Mann, who are basically my heroes! Thus, one must be warned that the man is extremely judgmental....
The Diagnosis
Before the 60's, says Bloom, American students seemed to long for European culture, for an understanding of their own cultural roots. They usually left high school unschooled and utterly ignorant. "This American intellectual obtuseness could seem horrifying and barbarous, a stunting of the full humanity, an incapacity to experience the beautiful..". Yet the liberal college experience, rooted in the great books, complemented their thirst for knowledge with a solid intellectual foundation in the European tradition and culture. All this has changed, and education now favors openness and diversity, which has left the whole country "speechless and meaningless". This is compounded by the evaporation of family life. Parents "have nothing to give their children in the way of vision of the world, of high models of action or profound sense of connection with others".
Bloom surveys the books students read (or do not read), their pitiful taste in music, the love for fast food, and of course has only a bleak prognosis. "Life is made into a nonstop, commercially pre-packaged masturbational fantasy." This lack of intellectual sophistication translates into stunted adults, who fail to achieve internal unity. Indeed, his observation of modern American life as a compound of crass materialism and coarse, vulgar excesses is both brutal and brilliantly accurate:"A man whose business life is prosaic and unmusical and whose leisure is made up of coarse, intense entertainment, is divided, and each side of his existence is undermined by the other."
He then surveys marriages, friendships, relationships and sex, and discusses the meaning of these ideas through the millennia. His diagnosis is that, due to an overemphasis on a questionable self-development, we have become solitaries and we have lost our ability to connect.
"The tension between freedom and attachment, and attempts to achieve the impossible union of the two, are the permanent condition of man. But in modern political regimes, where rights precede duties, freedom definitely has primacy over community, family or even nature."
In the realm of sex, Bloom sees an increase in sexual practice and an impoverishment of the eros in our society. As Freud suggested, sublimation of sexual impulses is the highest source of creative brilliance in man. With the cheap availability of sex, such higher activities in man have been hampered. Bloom is clearly silent on female creativity, something he seems to tacitly dismiss. Before getting mad at Bloom, women should understand that he simply presents a poignant picture of the world we have lost. Given his age and ideas, this is what he is good at. Bloom is clearly not a visionary, but a great student of history and philosophy. If we want to move on in our world, we also need people who are able to remind us of what we leave behind, just in case we feel too self-satisfied about our progress. This realization helped me skim over some really irritating, stupid comments like this:" Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk."
Nihilism in America
Here Bloom starts with his history of Western philosophy, and his prose becomes less colloquial, more convolute, and his ideas less predictable and more original. His central (and peculiar) thesis is that the US has been infiltrated by dangerous German ideologies, which have been perverted into our own version of continental despair, the characteristic American-style "liberal" nihilism we see today in our society. Our openness is a synonym for emptiness of values. He defends his view using his historical perspective that "the great influence of a nation with powerful intellectual life over less well endowed nations, even if the armies of the latter are very powerful, is not rare in human experience".
Thus we, the poorly endowed country, have imported the superior thoughts of Weber, Nietzsche and Heidegger, which have had major consequences in the shaping of our national identity. This is where we lost our compass. Nietzsche stood for rootedness, for a Germanness that was threatened by cosmopolitanism. His system of thought did not travel well to America because, in essence we are "a nonculture, a collection of castoffs from real cultures, seeking only comfortable self-preservation in a regime dedicated to superficial cosmopolitanism in thought and deed" Whereas the European project has essentially failed, giving rise to what Europeans spitefully call "burgeois man", Americans had traditionally believed that their project had succeeded and was a good one, until, of course, foreign ideas undermined it all.
He goes on to describe the main Western philosophical currents of the last 2 centuries, seeing Nietzsche as the turning point from the Enlightenment period to modernism and the corresponding value crisis. With his truism that "reason cannot establish values" he killed reason as the primary mode of thought. In addition, in the field of religion he removed the Christian God, as he admitted that the old Christian faith is no longer tenable. Nietzsche was an "agonized atheist", says Bloom, a man who deeply longed for value but refused to satisfy this longing, which he believed is a profound response to our entire spiritual condition. Thus, in him the highest spirit of true religiosity lived, in spite of the superficial view that he is famous for "killing God". Quite the opposite: it is Christianity which has perverted the idea of God. Bloom has the profoundest admiration for Nietzsche as the greatest thinker, and the best at diagnosing the ills of modernity. The unusual thing is that Nietzsche's thought was distorted in Germany to give rise to Nazism, and in the US was adopted by the Left and transformed into the sterile egalitarianism we see today. This "deconstructing and reconstructing" of Nietzsche on the Left took place in Paris, a strange way to characterize the brilliant French philosophical tradition which certainly received inspiration from Nietzsche and Heidegger, and built on them, as philosophical thought always does.
History of the University
The 70-page essay "From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede is a truly brilliant piece, in its clarity and depth, the best in the chapter and worthy of stand-alone publication. In this marvelous section, Bloom traces the history of knowledge, its institutions in Western society and the role a University should have in a liberal democracy.
Bloom clearly loathes the dumbed-down egalitarian society that America has become. When he diagnoses the main danger of a democratic society as the enslavement to public opinion (i.e. stupidity), he sounds like an elitist. He explains that the role of ivory towers is not to establish elites, but to preserve the freedom of mind. Without that, there cannot be a real democracy, but rather the dictatorship of an orchestrated public opinion. In this, he is starkly prophetic and compelling. I also think US society has been dumbed down to the point where democratic life is becoming problematic. And when Bloom mourns the loss of religiosity in civic life, it is important not to misunderstand him for a religious fundamentalist. Indeed, he makes clear how much he despises the latter by remarking that our political process "has led to the re-introduction of religion and the irrational in new and often terrifying guises".
I think here Bloom sums up very cogently the dramatic situation facing America today: faced with the sudden lack of values created by the triumph of the rationality that is indeed the main staple of the American project, many Americans are trying to re-introduce (biblical) values that are 6,000 years old, and this is due to the peculiar form of American ignorance Bloom so clearly diagnosed. We lack the understanding of our Western tradition and hence neither the Left nor the Right has the ability to build future possibilities based on these traditions. In the absence of a new project, religious fundamentalism is raising its ugly head.
We finally come to the crux of the matter when Bloom describes his personal experience in the 60s, that watershed that plunged the University into the abyss of nihilism. Here Bloom, from an experienced standpoint analyzes the curriculum and attempts to show how the lack of knowledge of the great pillars of Western tradition for the sake of multicultural openness is the primary cause of our current predicament. It is also the most irritating, rant-like section of the book. Bloom sees absolutely nothing positive in the 60s, and seems to ignore that the movement was a reaction to sexism, hypocritical puritanism, American imperialism, racial discrimination and oppression of women. If a liberal can admit that the movements of the 60s led to some extent to a dumbing down of our curricula, it is shocking that a conservative cannot admit that the movements in the 60s were the unavoidable consequence of a political and social situation which clearly perverted the ideals of equality that this country was believed to be founded upon.
His final forecast for the University, a place where people now go only to gather a useful piece of paper, is completely pessimistic. In it, the humanists are like "eunuchs guarding a harem of aging and now unattractive courtesans". How is that for a brilliantly-phrased cynical statement? In the disciplines, science is doing great, says Bloom. Clearly, he seems to be unaware of the great upheavals in science funding, with entire disciplines being wiped out to make room for the new and the trendy. If you listen to old scientists, you actually hear the same rants Bloom writes when he talks about the humanities. Bloom laments the rise of the social sciences (psychology, sociology, economics, political sciences), a field that both humanists and scientists despise immensely, the former because the new field has kicked them out from a previously held ground, the latter because social sciences, in spite of their name, have nothing scientific about them (the MBA degree, believes Bloom, is the greatest disaster ever to occur to education in America- I agree).
In a word, humanities, now displaced from the social sciences and ignored by science, "do not seem to suit the modern world". As a consequence, America is doomed. "One need not have read a line of philosophy - says Bloom in mockery - to be considered educated in this country"
This is our moment in world history - concludes the author - and, due to our general ignorance and lack of understanding of the world, there is much doubt that we are up to it.
Bloom's conservative rant ranges from brilliant to purely irritating, but his arguments are not easy to debunk. I always enjoy reading well-written essays because they stimulate thinking, and Bloom certainly achieves this. Due to his mental constitution, Bloom is more inclined to see what we are losing in our world as opposed to what we are gaining. Old guys are often like this. Young people clearly feel satisfied that our age has eliminated racial, sexual and cultural biases, and the creation of openness to other countries and other cultures seems to be a necessary basis to tackle an expanding, globalizing world. Bloom simply reminds us that this opening up has also weakened us. Unfortunately, in his prejudice, he does not see how new myths and values have to be created to prepare us for a vastly expanded and integrated planet.
It is to be hoped that our "nihilism" may be a necessary step toward the achievement of new highs, provided that we can sustain the attack from old-fashioned, sterile values, which, to me, represent the highest danger to America today. Indeed, in my opinion the American project was flawed from the very beginning. In passionately embracing rationality and utilitarianism and perverting Christian values to the point where they could provide the moral basis to wealth accumulation, the founders created a society that could only plunge into nihilism. I think it is the perversion of true Christian values into shameless self-interest and oppressive corporatism, and not the attachment to some Nietzschean pseudo-project, that has unraveled America.
Whether you reject or embrace Bloom's ideas (very few will), he is a stimulating writer, and he is the kind of philosophy professor I would have enjoyed having in school, a man who lives and breathes philosophy, instead of just regurgitating it from textbooks like my teachers always did. A remarkable man indeed.
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