Diagnosis of a Kulturkampf
David Gress, New Criterion
On Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.
Allan Bloom is a political philosopher, a friend and disciple of the late Leo Strauss. He teaches at the University of Chicago, which appears more and more to be one of the only institutions of higher learning in this country where it is still possible to pursue knowledge and wisdom for their own sakes, where the administration does not believe that the purpose of the university is to “reflect the surrounding society.” At Chicago, as he did earlier at Cornell, Professor Bloom has devoted himself to educating a few discerning students in the great tradition of Western thought, a tradition that once concerned itself above all with the most important things—namely, the question of the true and the good and the question of God. According to the Greeks and to virtually all Western thinkers up to Hegel, these questions were political questions, since no regime could endure unless its relation to the true, to the good, and to God was clarified. Politics was the arena where the most important things were debated, and a society that ignored that debate, or refused to engage in it, was no longer truly political, although it might continue for a while as a despotism, as Aristotle recognized.
Professor Bloom has now gathered his reflections in a book which is an extraordinarily accurate diagnosis of the current state of American civilization.1 Some of the advance praise for the book has given the mistaken impression that it is wholly, or even chiefly, taken up with the conditions in American universities. In fact, the reader who wishes, or fears, an extended diatribe against the lowering of standards and against misguided attempts by administrations and faculty to conform to the prevailing left-liberal culture will be disappointed. Bloom does offer much criticism on these matters, but he embeds it in a wider “meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their education.” The burden of that meditation is that American civilization is in great danger from those who do not understand that the purpose of education is to give students the power to form ideas of their own. Instead of being havens of independent thought, universities have become channels of indoctrination, inculcating attitudes regarded as respectable by the majority of American intellectuals and confirming the prejudices of those who control the agenda of public discourse. As Bloom shows, this problem, though much exacerbated by the cultural revolution of the Sixties, is in fact rooted in the Enlightenment belief that there is no conflict of purpose between the university and society. According to this belief, what the leaders of society and social opinion at any given time hold to be true should be taught as truth to the young.
As befits a philosopher concerned with truth and not with popularity, Bloom admits that his problem is one that belongs primarily to the elite.
Most students will be content with what our present considers relevant; others will have a spirit of enthusiasm that subsides as family and ambition provide them with other objects of interest; a small number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous. It is for these last, especially, that liberal education exists. They become the models for the use of the noblest human faculties and hence are benefactors to all of us, more for what they are than for what they do. Without their presence (and, one should add, without their being respectable), no society—no matter how rich or comfortable, no matter how technically adept or full of tender sentiments—can be called cultivated.
What the present considers “relevant” in education is above all the idea that truth is relative. In his introduction, entitled “Our Virtue,” Bloom shows how relativism, far from producing openness, has in fact produced the “closing of the American mind.” This closing is expressed in the indifference of students to the particular virtues of Western culture and in the insistence on the part of their teachers that other cultures are equal or superior to the culture of the West. Thus teachers set standards of relevance and judgment whose effects ripple through society at large, until the closing itself is felt as natural. Even before coming to the university, students assume that “[t]he purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue—openness.” This education of openness “pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime,” Bloom writes, “which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive.” Where earlier teaching inculcated the republican principles on which the United States was founded, current teaching debunks those principles while vaguely assuming that they will endure this constant pounding. Bloom cites an example from his own student days. A history professor once explained that George Washington was really motivated not by love of freedom but by the class interests of the Virginia squirearchy. Bloom asked whether this picture “did not have the effect of making us despise our regime.” The professor indignantly explained that the regime “doesn’t depend on individuals but on our having good democratic values.” When Bloom repeated that this was precisely the point—how can we believe in democratic values if those values are only the camouflage of class interests?—the professor got angry.
The teaching that truth is relative also implies that our own culture and regime are not worthy of particular respect simply because they are our own. Universities enforce this doctrine when they reject courses in Western civilization in favor of “non-biased” courses that treat the histories of non-Western cultures with special favor. The central achievements of Western culture are no longer thought to be of any interest in themselves, because it is assumed they will offend members of other cultures or minority groups, all of whom are entitled to esteem. As the philosopher John Rawls taught in A Theory of Justice, esteem is a basic need; thus we are not allowed to discriminate or even, in Bloom’s words, “to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for such discovery is coeval with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education.”
The belief in relativism and the debunking of Western culture are the result of a Kulturkampf a struggle to control culture.
The belief in relativism and the debunking of Western culture are the result of a Kulturkampf a struggle to control culture that is manifested in a broad campaign to control people’s feelings and form their attitudes. In this Kulturkampf Bloom’s history professor, who reduced George Washington’s professed beliefs to an expression of class interests, was only an advance guard. Today, we see the effects of this struggle in the inevitable tittering with which student audiences respond to invocations of patriotism, or in the reflex tendency to look for flaws and failures in American heroes or achievements. We can feel the effects in ourselves in the considerable effort we must make to overcome an almost instinctive suspicion that, for example, a laudatory history of the United States and of American ideals, such as George Tindall’s America: A Narrative History (1984), is somehow not an example of serious scholarship. Above all, the Kulturkampf is visible in the agenda of universities and of society, especially in the terms in which that agenda is formulated and in the presumptions it makes. A good way of measuring how the battle is going is to observe which positions seem perfectly natural, not requiring argument, and which are held to be indefensible. Among those taken for granted are the validity of relativism, the right of women and minorities to preferential treatment (in both the workplace and the college curriculum), and the presumption of American guilt in international affairs. In such a climate of received opinion, the ideas advanced by Bloom are anathema. That is why, although he praises the idea of the university as a place where the important questions are asked, he acknowledges that few, if any, American universities today are up to the task. The bulk of Bloom’s book is an attempt to explain how the idea of the university and of liberal education got lost, and what the effects of that loss are.
Bloom starts, as it were, at the end of the process, with the effects. In the first of the three sections of his book, entitled “Students” (the other two are “Nihilism, American Style” and “The University”), he describes the characters of his students today, and what he describes is exactly, frighteningly reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s brilliant essay of 1941, “The Abolition of Man,” in which Lewis describes the victims of modern pedagogy as “men without chests.” To be without a chest, in Lewis’s terms, is not only to be unheroic, it is to lack even the idea that heroism, virtue, or the hope of great achievements are admirable traits, worthy of praise or emulation. That lack can express itself in, say, the automatic ridicule of patriotism. But Bloom’s students of the late 1980s are not, so far as one can judge, politically radical; their “chestlessness” denies them even the hope of revolution that possessed their precursors in the late 1960s.
Until the Sixties, when “the culture leeches, professional and amateur, began their great spiritual bleeding,” American students were, in Bloom’s view, the best in the world. They knew less when they came to university than European students, who had read great novels in school and were familiar with European intellectual and political history, but this lack of knowledge was richly compensated by a “natural savagery,” manifested as a naïve eagerness to learn and a belief that knowing the great tradition of the West was important and rewarding. Ideas mattered, and the students were well served by their teachers. In 1955, Bloom contends, “no universities were better than the best American universities in the things that have to do with a liberal education and arousing in students the awareness of their intellectual needs.” One reason for this high quality of American education at this time was that many exiles from Nazi Germany—the survivors of the destruction of the German universities who carried with them the great tradition—found new homes in the best American universities. Unfortunately, beginning in the mid-Sixties, the universities gave in to a violent minority of students until “the whole experiment in excellence was washed away, leaving not a trace. The various liberations wasted that marvelous energy and tension, leaving the students’ souls exhausted and flaccid, capable of calculating, but not of passionate insight.”
Bloom forcefully illustrates this debacle by example and commentary, and gives free rein to his considerable talent for dramatic irony. At Cornell University in 1969, to cite one instance, the faculty and administration surrendered completely to the demands of radical black students. The provost, who later became university president, refused to censure a black faculty member who had threatened the life of a black student for refusing to participate in a demonstration. Taxed by Bloom with this outrageous shirking of responsibility, the provost said only that he “hoped there would soon be better communication with the radical black students.” Bloom adds laconically: “This was a few weeks before the guns emerged and permitted much clearer communication.” The provost, Bloom notes, had demonstrated “a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time.” As for the president, he was “interested only in protecting himself…. He was of the moral stamp of those who were angry with Poland for resisting Hitler because this precipitated the war.”
Appeasement seems too mild a term to describe the moral state of the majority of American professors in the face of the student revolt in the Sixties. Not only did they seem to have backbones made of limp spaghetti, they seemed to regard this trait as a sign of virtue. The teachers gave way to radical student movements, Bloom believes, “because they thought those movements possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide.” This moral truth included the idea, for example, “that old ladies who work as secretaries for draft boards are the equivalent of the Beast of Belsen and deserve no more respectful treatment than she did.” The old liberalism, which championed freedom of thought and expression, was redefined as an ideology of reaction. Professors who were happy in the Fifties to rely on academic freedom as protection from Joseph McCarthy rejected the notion of academic freedom for their opponents when their own opinions gained the favor of radical students.
In Bloom’s view, the professors surrendered in the Sixties ultimately because none of them, or very few, had any coherent notion of the idea or purpose of a university or of higher education in general. They did not understand that, apart from all the other bad results, their appeasement only served to integrate the universities more completely into the “system of democratic public opinion, and the condition of cavelike darkness amidst prosperity feared by Tocqueville.” Liberal social scientists like David Easton had already promised that “the great achievements of social science would be put in the service of the right values.” But despite their vaunted critical faculties, these social scientists were incapable of finding values anywhere but in the left-liberal moralism of the surrounding culture.
Of course, the professors and the students justified their moralism by claiming that it was a necessary purification that would lead to a new, great era of moral and cultural vitality. Instead, they killed all vitality, producing the “homogenized persons” of today. “At worst,” Bloom writes, “I fear that spiritual entropy or an evaporation of the soul’s boiling blood is taking place, a fear that Nietzsche thought justified …. 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.”
This slackness is due in part to the effects of the Kulturkampf in the family, according to Bloom. Parents “no longer have the legal or moral authority they had in the Old World. They lack self-confidence as educators of their children,” and yet they believe that they are somehow better and more enlightened than their ancestors. The combination of weak authority and a rejection of ritual, tradition, and the wisdom of old books produces children who “arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.” Older generations had fewer sources of inspiration, but better ones: the Bible and Shakespeare instead of Time. They knew little about the ephemera of world politics or about the latest attitudes toward sex and the family—matters that dominate the talk of supposedly educated people today; but they were “linked . . . to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material.” Without great revelations, epics, and philosophies “as part of our natural vision,” Bloom writes, “there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside.” The loss of this “longing for the beyond” produces, in Lewis’s phrase, “men without chests,” whose souls “are like mirrors, not of nature, but of what is around.
In Bloom’s view, the loss of vision—of the very idea of vision—has devastated the intellectual capacity of today’s students. Largely bookless, students lack the system of references and allusions that used to be the essential property of the educated Western man. How can the great books have any meaning to students who cannot even begin to grasp the point of Anna Karenina? For today’s students, Bloom argues, Anna’s problem is not tragic love but a “failed marriage,” and they have all learned from their parents what to do about that, namely, get a divorce. Moreover, they see Anna Karenina, like all the novels, stories, and epics of Western literature, as “sexist.” Such labels, Bloom concludes, not only discourage understanding but suppress the very notion that education can help “to free oneself from public guidance and find resources for guidance within oneself.”
So what do students have today if they do not have books? For one thing, they have rock music, a form of entertainment which requires no intellectual effort and which appeals to the least noble aspect of our natures:
Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching mtv. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.
The glorification of sex in rock music, Bloom notes, is in reality a glorification of narcissism without a trace of the erotic; and its social philosophy is a cheapened version of what was already cheap, namely the moralistic egalitarianism and anti-patriotism of the Sixties. Bloom might have added that rock music—especially in its music-video form—is the very antithesis of the linear culture of reading. Psychologists have pointed out that a culture based on reading demands the exercise—and hence the refinement—of more complex, higher-order brain functions than are needed to absorb the messages of purely visual images or of sound. Thus, the flattening of character among post-literate Western students is supported by physiology.
As observed by Bloom, students today are “nice,” not because they possess any nobility of character, indeed they frankly reject it as a desirable possibility, but because times are good. They have little sense of wonder, a lack that Bloom sees as closely related to their understanding of sex and sexual relationships. “The eroticism of our students is lame. It is not the divine madness Socrates praised; or the enticing awareness of incompleteness and the quest to overcome it; or nature’s grace, which permits a partial being to recover his wholeness in the embrace of another, or a temporal being to long for eternity in the perpetuity of his seed; or the hope that all men will remember his deeds; or his contemplation of perfection.” Rather, for today’s students sex is mechanical and narcissistic and soul-deadening, because it has come too early in their lives.
We properly sense that there is a long road to adulthood, the condition in which they are able to govern themselves and be true mothers and fathers . . . . I believe that the most interesting students are those who have not yet settled the sexual problem, who are still young, even look young for their age, who think there is much to look forward to and much they must yet grow up to, fresh and naive, excited by the mysteries into which they have not yet been fully initiated. There are some who are men and women at the age of sixteen, who have nothing more to learn about the erotic. They are adult in the sense that they will no longer change very much. They may become competent specialists, but they are flat-souled. The world is for them what it presents itself to the senses to be; it is unadorned by imagination and devoid of ideals. This flat soul is what the sexual wisdom of our time conspires to make universal.
This is a vitally important comment, even though I must register a rare disagreement with Bloom’s choice of words. If his argument is correct, it is precisely not the case that sexually active students have “nothing more to learn about the erotic.” In fact, they have everything to learn, but their behavior creates habits that make it unlikely they ever will.
In his section on social relationships, Bloom broadens his discussion to encompass the mores of society, thus demonstrating again that his book is not only about students or the university, but about American civilization as a whole. “Are the relations between men and women and parents and children determined by natural impulse or are they the product of choice and consent?” he asks. Clearly his own answer is the former, whereas the answer of modern culture is the latter. To act as though some sort of consent based on “democratic values” determines relationships which are actually determined by nature is, in Bloom’s view, to close minds and invite disaster. He describes how “women’s liberation” has liberated men from the obligation to care for their families and helped to create a vicious circle of shifting roles: as women demand the right to autonomous careers and an equal share of the responsibilities, they take away one important source of male pride and identity; the resulting male irresponsibility in turn appears to justify further the need for women to pursue careers. That economic conditions usually require two earners to produce a middle-class standard of living only increases the circle’s speed.
The ideology of feminism, in Bloom’s view, emancipated sex by taking away romance and by denouncing as sexist the traditional pursuit of women by men. “What sensitive male can avoid realizing how dangerous his sexual passion is? Is there perhaps really original sin? Men had failed to read the fine print in the Emancipation Proclamation. The new interference with sexual desire is more comprehensive, more intense, more difficult to escape than the older conventions . . . . The new reign of virtue, accompanied by relentless propaganda on radio and television and in the press, has its own catechism, including an examination of the conscience and the inmost sentiments for traces of possessiveness, jealousy, protectiveness—all those things men used to feel for women.” This particular version of Kulturkampf, it should be noted, is peculiarly American; it is not found, at least to the same degree, elsewhere in the West.
In the university, the reign of virtue has taken many forms. Bloom singles out one of these—affirmative action—for special attention. He notes that the young share with their teachers a belief that everyone should be treated equally; but the prevailing ideology easily allows them to accommodate the hypocrisy of affirmative action. Bloom remembers when radical black students at Cornell in 1969 “demanded the dismissal of the tough-minded, old-style integrationist black woman who was assistant dean of students. In short order the administration complied with this demand.” The end result of this type of behavior was “a debilitated normalcy.” A kind of “black domain . . . was created: permanent quotas in admission, preference in financial assistance, racially motivated hiring of faculty, difficulty in giving blacks failing marks, and an organized system of grievance and feeling aggrieved.”
The state of affairs Bloom describes is immediately familiar to anyone who spends much time at a university. It is profoundly demoralizing and creates a sort of virus of victimization that spreads far beyond the original “preferred groups.” If the hiring or promotion of any black, or now of any woman, is suspect, then conversely the non-hiring or non-promotion of any white male is suspect as well. The truth of this was demonstrated recently when a Stanford history professor, who in general holds liberal views, was denied tenure and immediately entered a grievance claim, openly surmising in the campus newspaper that the decision had to do with his being a white male. Apparently even the academic supporters of affirmative action—most of whom, unlike this man, are at no risk, since they already have tenure—suffer from its effects. Things have gone very far indeed, although one is not tempted to feel much sympathy. After all, the ideology they subscribe to has created a moral, political, and economic morass with which we all have to contend.
If all these are the effects of the current Kulturkampf what are its causes? To ask that question is to ask for an account of the entire course of modern politics and ideology. Bloom does not shrink from the task. Temporarily setting aside the closed minds and flat souls of today’s best and brightest, he draws back to survey the ideas that underlie modern politics and social beliefs, ideas concerning human rights, nature, the self, creativity, and culture. The drama of American civilization, in Bloom’s view, is the drama of how one version of those ideas, the version propagated by John Locke, has been undermined and partly superseded by the rival and contradictory vision of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Our nation, which seems to be a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke’s views of the state of nature and Rousseau’s criticism of them . . . . The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion . . . . This is the direct result of the two state-of-nature teachings. Locke’s is responsible for our institutions, justifies our absorption with private property and the free market, and gives us our sense of right. Rousseau’s lies behind the most prevalent views of what life is about and how to seek healing for our wounds.
Rousseau pointed out that Locke’s natural man, concerned with self-preservation and property and hence with the rule of law, was not really very natural at all. He had neither higher aspirations nor dark, subterranean compulsions. According to Rousseau, Bloom explains, “Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract…. The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look into his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off. Rousseau explodes the simplistic harmoniousness between nature and society that seems to be the American premise.”
The closing of the American mind, in the grand perspective of the ideological history of the past three centuries, is, then, the result of three converging factors: first, Locke’s definition of human purpose as security and prosperity, a definition whose degenerate form is the flat-souled hedonism of today’s young; second, Rousseau’s justified criticism that such a definition ignores the human need for collective faith, a faith that would act as the glue of the social contract (from this criticism grows the constant insistence in American political life for goals higher than mere safety, a degenerate form of which was the moralism of the Sixties); third, the wholesale adoption of nihilism disguised as value relativism. “There is now an entirely new language of good and evil,” Bloom writes, “originating in an attempt to get ‘beyond good and evil’ and preventing us from talking with any conviction about good and evil anymore …. The new language is that of value relativism, and it constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.”
The man who coined the phrase “beyond good and evil” was, of course, Friedrich Nietzsche, and it is Nietzsche who is Bloom’s real interlocutor throughout the second half of his book. Fittingly, Nietzsche plays an ambiguous role. Bloom blames him for fatally undermining the West’s belief that its hopes and highest aspirations were in accord with the true and the good, but also praises him for diagnosing a disease that was already incurable. The disease itself had already progressed through two stages: the Enlightenment had taught Europe that perfect concord between scientific progress, rational politics, and human betterment was possible; the French Revolution and the ideologies of nationalism and socialism had disproved and corrupted the Enlightenment’s promise.
Nietzsche was thus the prophet who called for heroic endurance and achievement —not in order to overcome despair, but to live despite it. In America, however, Nietzsche was taken to prove that you can live with nihilism, and live successfully, without the need for heroism; America offered the possibility of “nihilism with a happy ending.” The American temperament will not accept that there may be problems without solutions; it insists, rather, that reason and optimism can overcome all obstacles, that men are basically good, and that any flaws in society or individuals can be cured by reason or psychiatry. This elision of the tragic foundation of modern life has led, in Bloom’s view, to the falsity and thinness of modern American culture, turning it into what Bloom calls, in one of his more memorable formulations, “a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.”
As Bloom points out, Sigmund Freud and Max Weber both followed Nietzsche in denying that reason could really govern human affairs. Nietzsche had said that the appeal to reason was really an expression of the will to power by people using reason as ideological camouflage. Freud demonstrated that what most of us consider good reasons for our behavior are in fact anything but that. “Weber,” Bloom says, “found it impossible to prefer rational politics to the politics of irrational commitment.” He argued that “reason in politics leads to the inhumanity of bureaucracy” and “believed that reason and science themselves were value commitments like any other commitments, incapable of asserting their own goodness . . . . Politics required dangerous and uncontrollable semireligious value positing.” This was the point at which German nihilism diverged from the American version and accelerated rapidly toward disaster. One cause of that divergence was the somber, merciless consistency of the German thinkers. They methodically followed through the consequences of Nietzsche’s announcement that God was dead and that good and evil were defunct categories of meaning, and they stated the results of their thinking with uncompromising clarity. Those who read Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber “constituted that ambiguous Weimar atmosphere in which liberals looked like simpletons and anything was possible for people who sang of the joy of the knife in cabarets.”
By contrast, Americans found in Freud and Weber a wholly different message: namely, that the use of reason could defeat and bind the irrational compulsions that control behavior and could solve the problems of the death of God and the advent of mass democracy. Walter Kaufmann, not a critic with whom Bloom otherwise has much in common, once pointed out that the Freud Americans read is a curiously optimistic Freud, a Freud without his sting, a Freud who teaches that psychoanalysis really will cure the self and, by extension, society. The Freud read in Germany was a revealer of the dark basement below bourgeois society, one who promised at best a temporary palliative in individual cases, but whose fundamental message, in such late works as Civilization and its Discontents or Moses and Monotheism, was that social and individual progress is fragile and dubious at best, and at worst outweighed by its cost. This reading seemed only confirmed by the rise of Hitler and National Socialism, and by the philosophical justification of Nazism offered by another great disciple of Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger.
As president of the University of Heidelberg in 1933-34, Heidegger gave his notorious Rektoratsrede, or president’s speech, in which he said that Nazism was the unity of politics and philosophy and that it deserved the “affirmative support” of all thinking people. This speech appears as a focal point in the last section of Bloom’s book, entitled “The University.” For Bloom, it represents the extreme attained by those who took seriously the Enlightenment promise that human reason and politics ought to be allied. From the time of Socrates to the Enlightenment, Bloom points out, philosophers had believed that there was no natural alliance of political authority and philosophy, that the two were in fact naturally in conflict, that politics was a threat to philosophy. It was assumed that the search for the true and the good and the discussion of the most important things, which are the tasks of philosophy, would always be despised both by the rulers of the city—the political community—and by its citizens. If a philosopher wished to speak to the city, like Machiavelli, he could only do so by concealing his true message and pretending to speak the same language as the rulers.
Not long after Machiavelli’s time, however, the natural opposition between philosophy and politics started to crumble under pressure of a new idea, that knowledge is power. If knowledge is indeed power, then the task of philosophy, namely to pursue knowledge, is a political task. Knowledge as power in turn became allied with another notion, that the purpose of power is human betterment and social progress. These two notions in combination created the constellation of the Enlightenment and its misplaced faith in the political use of reason.
Bloom refers to Weber’s notion of the “last man,” the character-type produced by—and in turn producing—the perfectly rational, bureaucratic society. The “last man,” whom we could also call, following Lewis, the “chestless man,” has solved the relation between reason and the human good and has achieved a kind of happiness at the price of forgetting what the real search for happiness was once about. The flatness of the last man’s soul is the result of a philosophical, not a political, disaster. This is what differentiates the crisis of the West from the decline of Greek civilization or the end of the Roman Empire.
With the “last man”—who is happy because his purpose in life is to find values to believe in rather than to discover the good— we have come full circle. We are back with the students Bloom described at the beginning of his book. They think they are finding their own values, but they really have only two choices: they can follow nihilism to its conclusion and simply decide what to do as an act of will, indulging in irrational commitment for the mere sake of action; or they can reflect, in the mirrors of their souls, what is around them. In fact, the two choices are only one, as the Heidelberg students of 1933 and the Columbia students of 1968 demonstrated. Irrational commitment turned out in practice to be nothing other than the reflection of what was around.
The difference between finding values and discovering the good is, Bloom says, the same as the difference between the language of tradition (known to the grandparents of today’s students) and the language of relativism, which does not allow the discussion of good and evil except as matters of opinion. The difference between these two languages is the real subject of Bloom’s book, and the closing of the American mind in the name of openness is a measure of the victory of the language of relativism over the language of truth and error.
There is a fatal flaw in the language of relativism, however: it depends for its own validity on a rationalism that it implicitly denies. In a sense, relativism suffers from the liar’s paradox: “Everything I say is a He, including this sentence.” One way out of the impasse is for the relativist to say that, whereas there is no such thing as discovering the good, there are areas of life, such as “the sacred,” that have meaning for certain groups and individuals, and as such have a curious sort of provisional validity. Bloom easily disposes of this intellectual sleight-ofhand, concluding that “these sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.”
Having described the grand history of nihilism in the Western mind, Bloom has one task left, and that is to relate that grand history to the smaller history of the university itself. Here the poignancy of his early chapters returns. The reader is made painfully aware that Bloom understands, perhaps better than anyone alive in America today, what the idea of the university is, and how little our universities live up to that idea.
Like Leo Strauss, Bloom chooses his language and his forms of expression very carefully, and the reader must be attentive not just to the message but to the precise way in which each argument is made. Bloom’s language in speaking of the university is especially important, because in saying what the university is he is describing not the contemporary world but the ideal world. He is offering, I believe, a form of ironic incantation in the hope that a few of us might listen and try to bring about the reality he invokes. The university, according to Bloom, is the place where society permits philosophers “an eternal childhood . .. whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society.” But society must have no expectations from the university other than that philosophers there will talk with one another about the most important things.
Bloom has not yet told us why he follows Plato in believing that true philosophers are at odds with the rest of society. In a chapter entitled “From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede” he takes up the question in a brief, almost parenthetical passage:
The essential difference between the philosopher and all other men is his facing of death or his relation to eternity . . . . The question is how one lives, and only the philosopher does not need opinions that falsify the significance of things in order to endure them. He alone mixes the reality of death—its inevitability and our dependence on fortune for what little life we have—into every thought and deed and is thus able to live while honestly seeking perfect clarity. He is, therefore, necessarily in the most fundamental tension with everyone except his own kind. He relates to all the others ironically, i.e., with sympathy and a playful distance . . . he has no expectation of essential progress. Toleration, not right, is the best he can hope for.
Clearly for Bloom the Enlightenment alliance of knowledge and politics, of philosophy and society, was based on a misguided belief in a common purpose, and what is more, on a surrender of philosophy to the belief in progress which the philosophers from Plato through Machiavelli to Hobbes had denied. When philosophers started to believe in progress, politicians started to believe in the political utility of philosophy, and both sides began the slide down the slippery slope that ended in Germany in Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede. In America today, university administrators argue less dangerously than Heidegger, but in furtherance of the same belief, that the university must be ministerial to society, that it should absorb socially respectable views and ideologies and communicate them to its students, thereby providing effective, useful citizens and effective, useful discoveries for society’s leaders to use in their mastery of nature and man.
Bloom concludes his account of the career of knowledge by writing that “Heidegger’s teachings are the most powerful intellectual force in our times.” He then proceeds, in his penultimate chapter, “The Sixties,” to prove this by example. In that unhappy decade, the Kulturkampf broke upon campuses that held more promise than ever before in American history. The result was the destruction of that promise and the final “snapping of the threads” that bound the noble American “savages” to the great tradition. The thread-snappers, students and faculty alike, “could waste the capital because they did not know they were living off of it. They returned to the university, declared it bankrupt and thereby bankrupted it. They abandoned the grand American liberal traditions of learning.” As a consequence, not only are today’s “nice” students “men without chests,” but
the university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person . . . . there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is. The question has disappeared, for to pose it would be a threat to the peace . . . . Out of chaos emerges dispiritedness, because it is impossible to make a reasonable choice. Better to give up on liberal education and get on with a specialty in which there is at least a prescribed curriculum and a prospective career . . . . The student gets no intimation that great mysteries might be revealed to him, that new and higher motives of action might be discovered within him, that a different and more human way of life can be harmoniously constructed by what he is going to learn.
What the students want, apparently, is the pale, disinfected security of non-racist, non-sexist, non-biased undergraduate courses, followed by professional school and a good job. What they need—and what they will not get unless they are lucky enough to be taught by Allan Bloom—is the discovery of the great tradition and, we must now add, of the history of how that tradition has been obscured and ridiculed.
The Closing of the American Mind finishes on what I think, given Bloom’s argument, is an essential ambiguity. The promise of the modern university that science and society could be reconciled for the common good has failed. Yet if the promise is entirely dead, why bother to write the book other than as an obituary which no one could understand anyway? Bloom’s somber conclusion is that, “just as in politics the responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime, so the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved upon our universities, and the two are related as they have never been before.” An observer stationed at a leading university, as I am, would have to conclude that those who represent knowledge appear utterly oblivious to the responsibility Bloom recognizes. Nevertheless, as the German poet Hölderlin wrote, “Where there is danger/There also grows that which will save us.”
- The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, by Allan Bloom, with an introduction by Saul Bellow; Simon & Schuster, 392 pages, $18.95.
