Closing of the American Mind (62 page)

The purpose of a four-year liberal arts program—defended by Bloom as an exploration of the big questions that life presents to the fully conscious human being—became confused. What was the point of a bachelor of arts degree? Was it to plumb the depths and origins of Western civilization, which had after all invented the university, and to develop the student spiritually and morally? Or was the point to set the kid up to get a cushy job? Humanists in our universities lost confidence in the traditional answer. And their departments, the seat of liberal arts, suffered in the confusion, losing students to the social sciences and programs devoted to professional training, such as pre-law or business. The humanities responded by either aping the professional curriculum or shrinking still further into the theory and abstraction that Bloom devastatingly describes. Core courses were dropped. Teachers of literature or philosophy had difficulty describing what they did for a living, or why.

By the time Bloom's book was released the crisis in the humanities was acknowledged by everyone except the people who worked in the humanities. Parents in particular began to wonder why their college-age children were taking classes called “Hip-Hop Eshu: Queen Bitch 101” (at Syracuse University) or coming home after four years with degrees in “Peace Studies” that cost $100,000. Phrases that were used without irony by many profs in the humanities—“politically correct” (good) and “Dead White Males” (bad)—were captured by their critics and turned into shorthand for the leftwing orthodoxy that filled the vacuum in the liberal arts.

The crisis was made political fodder. The Reagan administration took a special interest and an especially acerbic tone. Lynne Cheney, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Secretary of Education, William Bennett, led the dyspeptic chorus. Both held doctorates in the humanities, which enhanced their influence with the higher-ed establishment not at all. When Cheney echoed Bloom in a widely publicized report—criticizing efforts by humanities departments to make themselves “relevant” by treating “great books as little more than the political rationalizations of dominant groups”—she earned many multiple minutes of hate all on her own.

With the publication of
Closing,
Bloom was placed alongside Bellow, Bennett, and later the jurist and Jeremiah, Robert Bork, in a convenient journalistic category: the Doom and Gloomers, or the Killer B's, or the Grumpy Old Men. (Cheney, alphabetically disqualified to serve with the Killer B's, was nevertheless an honorary Grump.) But this grouping wasn't fair to Bloom, not entirely—and it wasn't fair to the arguments developed in the book, which had a subtlety and depth that journalism and partisan politics can seldom capture.

Bloom was never a movement conservative. In electoral politics he was a moderately liberal Democrat, and more liberal still in personal and social matters. Unlike Bennett or Cheney, who considered themselves champions of ordinary American bourgeois life, Bloom viewed it with a disdain that runs just below the book's surface. He was no fan of the free market or the ceaseless getting and striving that it encourages. He worried that the life that awaited students after college would be just as enervating as their dismal and purposeless education. And he wasn't above invoking a brand-name cliché to drive the point home. In their “Brooks Brothers suits,” he writes, “they will want to get ahead and live comfortably. But this life is as empty and false as the one they left behind.” Elsewhere he speaks of the “intellectual deserts” of middle-class living and “the dreary professional training that awaits [liberal arts students] after the baccalaureate.”

There is no element of moral uplift in his brief against modern life. Discussing the collapse of the traditional family, which has only accelerated since his time, he writes: “I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should or could go back to them.” Bloom's discussion of rock music (see pages 68–81 if you've forgotten, though how could you?) was always adduced as Exhibit A in the charge of fuddy-duddyism—to most people under the age of thirty-five, his complaints sounded no more informed or intelligent than the bellowing of the old crank next door: “Turn it down!” But his case against rock was entirely his own; he worried that it deadened the passion required for real education. “My concern here,” he wrote, “is not the moral effects of this music—whether it leads to sex, violence, or drugs.” This placed Allan Bloom to the left of Tipper Gore, at the time an energetic crusader against the depredations of Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard.

In the last quarter-century, the reader will notice, Bloom's book has grown a few whiskers. Anachronisms are unavoidable. He wrote before the population of modernity's Holy Trinity—Marx, Freud, and Darwin—reduced by two-thirds. Marx lost his allure, at least nominally, after the collapse of the murderous regimes that claimed to have been built from his ideas. Freud was demoted from scientist to cultural observer, and an unreliable one besides. Some of Bloom's language is outdated: no professor today could use the word “Oriental” for “Asian” and long survive. He objects to squishy nonce words, but the examples he uses—“commitment,” “values,” “life-style”—are now so deeply embedded in everyday speech that no amount of ridicule will dislodge them. He's lucky he didn't live to see the infinitely elastic use of the now-meaningless word “issues.” I was touched by his quaint mention of “Mack the Knife” as an example of American life's homogenizing effects: mass marketed by Louis Armstrong (I assume he couldn't bring himself to mention Bobby Darin), Brecht's leftist agitprop “becomes less dangerous, though no less corrupt.” What would Bloom have made of the taming of the Village People's “YMCA”—a tribute to the joys of shower-room sodomy transformed into a surefire crowd-pleaser at middle-school pep rallies? The controversy over “affirmative action,” which he treats at length, was settled by the subtler logic of “diversity.” And the book gives little notice to the arrival on campus of gay rights, easily the most consequential social movement of the last three decades.

But I'm surprised by how few the anachronisms are. Most of Bloom's criticisms still apply. I can think of lots of reasons why
The Closing of the American Mind
deserves as many readers as it earned in the eighties—Bloom's sly wit and the torrential energy of his prose are worth the price of admission, in my opinion—but one carries a special urgency. The trends he tagged in higher education in 1987 have only intensified: toward weaker academic requirements for students, greater specialization in the departments, a rigid orthodoxy in the university's politics and cultural life. The university we face today is still the one he described, only more so.

At a minimum, what Bloom demands of us in response is awareness—thoughtfulness. He hated unthinking conformity above all. The contemporary university appalled him because it had conformed to the frivolous culture that surrounds it and from which it was meant to stand apart. The cheap relativism it absorbed led inevitably to the undoing of the liberal arts. The humanities retreated from the traditional ways of teaching and learning when humanists stopped believing the effort could reveal any truths about the perplexities of life. In liberal education, relativism is a universal corrosive.
¹
No discipline can survive it. If there's no truth, finally, why study the work of dead people who were deluded enough to think there was? And without the pursuit of what's finally true, higher education becomes post-secondary professional training—that's if we're lucky; a four-year booze cruise if we're not.

If I had reread
The Closing of the American Mind
ten years ago, when my own children were themselves under ten, I confess I would have thought Bloom's portrait of educational decline was overwrought. But then they grew up and went off to school.

Recall the passage on page 337. A freshman arrives on campus. “He finds a democracy of disciplines,” Bloom wrote. “This democracy is really an anarchy because there are no recognized rules and no legitimate titles to rule. In short, there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is.” In the end the freshman will likely give up on a liberal education, opting for a major that will get him hired when he graduates and “picking up in elective courses a little of whatever is thought to make one cultured.”

This observation from twenty-five years ago describes what a freshman encounters at a moderately selective university today, and with modest adjustments, even at smaller colleges that say they specialize in the liberal arts. It is what my own family found. Poring over the catalog of courses in the weeks before my son enrolled at our big state university (which I have come to think of, for reasons soon to become clear, as BSU), we discovered that no survey classes were available to him in American history, English literature, the history of science, ancient or modern philosophy. His “general education” requirements could be satisfied by a scattering of electives, none related to any other. He was required to enroll in a writing class, which was good. The writing classes offered were “
Mad Men
and American Society,” “A History of the Sixties,” and “Intro to Queer Theory.” Which was not.

Last year, the Association of College Trustees and Alumni surveyed the catalogs of more than one thousand colleges and universities. Fewer than 20 percent of the schools required courses in American government, only a third required a literature survey class, and 15 percent required anything more than a beginner's level class in a foreign language. The “core curriculum,” as at BSU, is largely a sham: a math class may be offered, a science class may be offered, but seldom are both required, and often the content of each has only a glancing relation to the study of math or science. The results have been predictable. The authors of
Academically Adrift
—the most devastating book about higher education since
Closing
—found that nearly half of undergraduates show no measurable improvement in learning or “critical thinking” after two years of college.

Perhaps the most famous image in
Closing
—certainly the least appetizing—is a cartoonish word picture of an MTV-watching, Walkman-wearing thirteen-year-old boy, the flower of American civilization, the human culmination of centuries of learning and sacrifice, nonetheless brought low by a degraded popular culture: “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,” and so on and so on, whose “life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbation fantasy.”

I thought of that boy of thirteen when I finished rereading
The Closing of the American Mind
not long ago. He is now thirty-eight. His parents, I hope, survived his childhood unscathed; I won't speculate about the onanism. He likely has children of his own by now. And I hope by the time his own daughter is ready for college, he and all the youngsters he was meant to symbolize will have forgiven the author of this scandalous but all too realistic caricature. And when he disgorges tens of thousands of dollars to send his daughter to a school that has itself become a caricature of higher education, I am consoled to think that he will be able to consult Allan Bloom as to how such a thing could come to pass, thanks to a new edition of his maddening, haunting, towering book.

1
I'm aware that defenders of relativism defend it by denying it exists: no one, they say, truly believes that one idea is ultimately as good as any other. And of course they're right that none of us act in our own lives as though we believed this. But most of us profess it nonetheless. In a genial but harrowing review of
Closing
, a teacher named Michael Zuckert told how he canvassed the students in his American Political Thought class at Carleton College. He asked whether they agreed that the truths in the first lines of the Declaration of Independence were indeed “self-evident.” Seven percent voted “yes.” On further conversation, he wrote, it turned out “that they were convinced there is no such thing as ‘truth,' self-evident or otherwise, in the sphere of claims of the sort raised in the Declaration.” He would have gotten much the same response in a classroom today.

Achilles,
66
,
274
,
280
,
281
,
285

Adams, Henry,
55

Adler, Mortimer,
54

Adorno, Theodore,
146
,
224
,
225

Alcibiades,
268
,
282

Alembert, Jean d',
257

Alexander the Great,
281
,
309

Allen, Woody,
125
,
144
–46,
154
,
155
,
173

American Association of University Professors,
325

Anna Karenina
(Tolstoy),
64
,
108
,
229

Apology
(Plato),
265
–67,
274
,
276
,
278
,
281

Aquinas, Saint Thomas,
376

Arendt, Hannah,
152

Aristophanes,
381

Aristotle,
305

Aquinas on,
376

family relations and,
112

friendship viewed by,
75
,
125

gentlemen educated by,
279
–81

Great Books education and,
344
–45

great-souled man of,
250

Heidegger and,
310

Hobbes vs.,
255

Marsilius of Padua and,
283

medieval scholasticism and,
252
–53,
264
,
378