{I continue to ponder the rise of Postmodern Cultural Marxism and its trusty sidekick, Political Correctness. In today’s episode, Allan Bloom, in the tradition of William F. Buckley Jr., makes a name for himself by biting the hand that feeds him.}
"We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part." (Allan Bloom)
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is." (Senator Dan Quayle, 1989)
In 1987, Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind and became the most famous academic since Timothy Leary. Bloom’s book addressed what he called “the decomposition of the university,” as novelist Saul Bellow explained in his Foreword:
The heart of Professor Bloom’s argument is that the university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. By consenting to play an active, ‘positive,’ or participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society’s ‘problems.’ Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes, and the university has become society’s conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences.
Bloom himself put the matter this way: “A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, “what is man?” In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them. For modern nations,” Bloom continued, “which have founded themselves on reason in its various uses more than did any nations in the past, a crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis they face.”
For Bloom, the crisis was best expressed by the approach of “deconstructionist” professors of literature “who say that there is both no text and no reality to which the texts refer.” 1 Bloom also criticized contemporary “relativism,” even while acknowledging its link to tolerance and open-mindedness: “Almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.”
For Bloom, the point of students’ keeping their minds open was to allow professors to fill those minds with Truth and Wisdom. Echoing William F. Buckley, Bloom suggested that academic neutrality was impossible:
“Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection; but even the neutral subjects, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. Democratic education wants and needs to produce men and women [who are] supportive of a democratic regime.”
Acknowledging that the history of American racism—slavery and Jim Crow—made it necessary to address and to correct “ethnocentrism,” Bloom believed that multiculturalism and diversity had become overemphasized, at the expense of traditional academic concerns and standards. Not everything was about race, he argued, or about gender. The problem went beyond the university; the entire society was kowtowing to such demands, “Much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purpose of making an assault on [the] majority. The very idea of a majority is done away with in order to protect the minorities.”
Bloom was exposing what he saw as the triumph of the “protected” class: all those victimized snowflakes clamoring for affirmative action, the shelter of “hate crime” legislation, and the provision of campus speech codes and “safe spaces”. These developments were consistent with the “values relativism” previously mentioned, a relativism which Bloom insisted led inevitably to nihilism.
Bloom located the source of these philosophical evils in the writings of a host of modern German philosophers: Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Freud, Heidegger, Eric Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. In fact, wrote Bloom, “Our intellectual skyline has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than has our physical skyline by German architects.” 2
Even if American nihilism was, to quote Holden Caulfield, “phony,” Bloom found it troubling:
Although nihilism and its accompanying existential despair are hardly anything but a pose for Americans, they pursue happiness in ways determined by that language [caring, self-fulfillment, expanding consciousness, and so on]: a search for an inwardness that one knows one has, but which seems to have no relation to the outer world. No wonder the mere sound of the Existentialists’ Nothing or the Hegelians’ Negation has an appeal to contemporary ears. American nihilism is a mood, it is nihilism without the abyss.
“Cultural Marxism,” which for Bloom was a misnomer, was but the latest iteration of nihilism: “The later Marxists in Germany,” he explained, “were haunted by the idea of culture, repelled by the vulgarity of the bourgeoise. In general, sophisticated Marxism [turned into] cultural criticism of life in the Western democracies. But none of it came from Marx or a Marxist perspective; there is not a single element of Marx in any of it. It was, and is, Nietzschean, variations on our way of life as that of ‘the last man.”
Whatever its origins, the academic plague had arrived and was devastating the American university:
As in the Middle Ages, the major student activity in social science is now to identify heretics. It has become almost impossible to question the radical orthodoxy without risking vilification, classroom disruption, loss of the confidence and respect necessary for teaching, and the hostility of colleagues. Racist and sexist are very ugly labels—the equivalents of atheist or communist in other days with other prevailing prejudices—which can be pinned on persons promiscuously and which, once attached, are almost impossible to cast off. Nothing can be said with impunity. Such an atmosphere makes detached, dispassionate study impossible.
Somehow, despite the intimidating atmosphere, Bloom was able to write The Closing of the American Mind. Along with E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, Bloom’s book was hailed as a defense of classic liberal education against obnoxious students chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” More than that, it was a wide-ranging philosophical polemic against Western modernity and its Nietzschean premises; it was also a best-seller that turned Bloom into a celebrity and a conservative icon. Neither Bloom nor his book were universally applauded, however; one reviewer compared Bloom to Oliver North (“vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic”) and said that The Closing of the American Mind was a book that “any decent person would be ashamed of having written”. Noam Chomsky called Bloom’s arguments “mind-bogglingly stupid,” while Camille Paglia credited Bloom with having fired “the first shot in America’s culture wars”.
One thing is certain: The Closing of the American Mind got people’s attention.
_______________________________________________
https://theclosingoftheamericanmind.com/#TheGermanConnection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom
1 Bloom was likely alluding to Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in this Class?
2 Interestingly, Bloom’s academic mentor was the German-born philosopher Leo Strauss.
Posted by: |