The Weekly Standard‘s current cover story reminds us that Alan Bloom’s treatise on education (and, really, culture), alternately prophetic and infamous, is now a quarter-century old. Andrew Ferguson, in his essay celebrating “the book that drove them crazy,” begins by recounting The Closing of the American Mind‘s improbable ascent to the top of the bestseller charts. Few people–perhaps least of all Bloom himself–thought that a book delving into academic politics, extensively analyzing Nietzsche, Rousseau, and Heidegger, and lamenting the contemporary state of university life would penetrate beyond a few friendly academic circles, much less enter into everyday American discourse:
The course that Bloom’s classic took on its way from the higher mental life to boffo box office is notable even among the endless eruptions and craterings of the American book business. Bloom adapted his proposal for Closing from an article he’d written in National Review. At Simon & Schuster the proposal was bought by one editor and midwifed into print by another, with no more than modest expectations. The original title, Souls Without Longing, was lovely, everyone agreed, but also uncommercial, so it was changed and outfitted with one of those clanky, hyper-explanatory subtitles that were soon to be essential for nonfiction books. The first print run, in February 1987, numbered 10,000 copies.
By late spring it was selling 25,000 copies a week. It hit the bestseller list in April, reached number one by summertime, and stayed there for two and a half months. You saw people lugging it around on vacation, bumping in the bottom of the beach bag against the tanning oil and the extra pair of flipflops and the latest waterlogged paperback from Ken Follett.
Bloom’s work entered the mainstream and shaped the country’s conversation because it hit upon a deeply-felt, though unvoiced, sentiment in American culture, and one that was officially off-limits, too: something was seriously askew in our universities, and students’ souls were being kept (or made!) “flat” by the experience. Tolerance and liberation, values sermonized about by the establishment for several decades, had devolved into mere relativism, and our future citizens were losing touch with the Western heritage that had made education possible in the first instance.
Read the rest of Ferguson’s essay here.
April 3rd, 2012 | 11:19 am
How timely. I was just culling books off my shelves yesterday, came across this one, and said, “I’m keeping that one!” But I badly need to reread it, since I first encountered it in my early or mid 20′s and there has been a lot of water under the intellectual and spiritual bridge since then.
April 3rd, 2012 | 11:39 am
I sometimes wonder if I’m the only one who read “The Closing of the American Mind” in its entirety. I say that because so many liberals seemed to regard it as a manifesto for the Morl Majority and so many conservatives embraced it wholeheartedly… when in reality, Allan Bloom was not what EITHER side assumed he was, and he made a lot of argumnets that should have confounded his allies and pleasantly surprised his enemies.
Back when it was a best seller, I remember reading that Michael Kinsley had stuck his business card in dozens of copies of the book at a local Barnes & Noble, with the words “Call this number and I’ll give you $500.” Not surprisingly, he never got a single call.
I strongly suspect that millions of people who bought the book read ONLY the chapters about rock and roll (he hated it) and the upheaval on college campuses i nthe Sixties. Based on these chapters, readers decided (wrongly) either that “He’s one of us (yay!)” or “He’s one of THEM (ugh).” AFter that, when Bloom started talking about Wittgenstein and Heidegger… most readers’ eyes glazed over and they just stopped reading.
I actually read ALL the chapters, which is why I know Bloom was not at all what either his admirers or detractors thought. His detractors imagined he was a Moral Majoritarian because he hated rock music, and Christian conservatives loved him for that same reason. But in truth, Bloom was a gay, Jewish agnostic who had no use for Christianity. He hated rock music for reasons of his own.
Bloom was a GENUINE nihilist, a true Nietzschean. He objected to rock music and to modern pop culture because he thought they TRIVIALIZED nihilism! Bloom thought the realization that there’s no God and that life is meaningless should lead us first to desapir and THEN to a fierce determination to expnad our intellects and FIND some meaning in our lives. Instead, in the U.S.A., we would up with an all-pervasive Nihilism Lite.
Allan Bloom and, say, Joseph Ratzinger both hated Sixties radicals, but for incompatible reasons. Ratzinger hated them because he thought they were undermining inportant truths. Bloom hated them because, after demolishing the canon and the Great Books, they left us with pop psychology and empty platitudes. When Nietzsche proclaimed “God is dead,” he thought that SHOULD shae our society to the core, and lead us to re-evaluate our lives completely! Instead, America embraced a watered-down Nietzschean worldview (“No God, so… you do your thing and I’ll do my thing, and everything is groovy”).
April 3rd, 2012 | 11:47 am
Andrew Ferguson mischaracterizes the arguments the arguments of “Closing” in several places.
For instance, he dismisses Martha Nussbaum’s claim that Bloom presents himself as a religious man in the text of the book. Nussbaum’s claim is simply true as a matter of literal interpretation, though. About the Bible and its decline within family life, Bloom says, “The cause of this decay of the family’s traditional role as the transmitter of tradition is the same as that of the decay of the humanities: nobody believes that the old books do, or even could, contain the truth.” Later he says, “I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things.”
In several other places, Bloom returns to the theme that ancient texts should not be read as mere “literature” to give us access to an alien way of thinking. Rather, he insists again and again that the only books worth reading are those that contain actual truth. This very clearly leads to the conclusion that Bloom is suggesting to his readers that the Bible is truth or something close to it.
Now, a good Straussian will say that Bloom is writing esoterically and that we need to read between the lines and, in particular, focus on the argument made in the middle of the book rather than the beginning and the end. However, Bloom was writing before wikipedia and the internet could have told most of his popular audience readers that he was a Straussian thinker. Indeed, Bloom only mentions the name “Leo Strauss” once in the entire book even though a third of the book is a direct popularization of Strauss’s ideas. Only his “elite” readers would have the tools to pick up on his “esoteric” meaning.
I think this gets to why Bloom frustrates a lot of people. The beginning and the end of the book serve to hit all the right notes on culture war topics: he serves up plenty of red meat on feminism, affirmative action, campus leftists, rock music, postmodernism and the decline of religion. However, he noticably provides no actual solutions to any of these problems and in the middle of the book expresses grave doubts about whether America has a stable enough philosophical foundation to succeed as a liberal democracy in the long-run. It’s also not clear whether his core criticism of the modern university — that it is ignoring texts that can provide a truthful, coherent and cohesive explanation of the world and man’s place in it — is actually true. If Bloom’s core claim is false, as I think it is, Bloom’s “indictment” of the modern university fails.
April 3rd, 2012 | 12:04 pm
“Bloom was a GENUINE nihilist, a true Nietzschean.”
Possibly true. Since I think Bloom was writing esoterically (there really is no other way of reading him, in my view) and in an often convoluted manner, it’s not clear what his actual philosophy is.
However, Nietzsche was clear that only an elite few were capable of thriving without religion. The rest would either wallow in despair or else attach themselves to a charismatic figure who provides soothing answers. Bloom is clearly an elitist himself but he also expresses the view that philosophers should not always tell the truth and criticizes Socrates on this very ground. So if Bloom is a Nietzschean, he is horrified enough about the consequences of this belief system that he won’t present it for mass consumption in his book.
Regardless, though, Bloom clearly considers Nietzsche an important thinker to be reckoned with.
April 3rd, 2012 | 2:26 pm
If you can deal with the at times abstruse style, it’s a great read. Though, I’ve interacted with some folks all over the political spectrum who rightfully find “issues” with how Bloom (and Straussians in general) arguably misrepresent the great thinkers of old.
I don’t know enough about Nietzsche to comment. But I have studied the American Founding and Enlightenment in detail. I really haven’t found any support whatsoever for the esoteric atheism they find. The real story is more interesting. Heresy was a crime back then. What the Straussians see as esoteric atheism is really just unorthodox, very often unitarian, Christianity — and THAT could get you killed back then.
April 3rd, 2012 | 2:36 pm
Astorian: Bloom was not an agnostic. He was a fervent atheist. He thought no true philosopher could believe in God. All the philosophizing about religion and natural rights was a nice mental exercise in useful fictions. But “real” philosophy was atheistic.
One irony I note is the current age in which we live — the age of the Internet and open information — is so bad for the idea that “real” philosophy (nihilistic, atheistic) should be done in secret. It’s d–ned near impossible to keep anything secret anymore.
April 3rd, 2012 | 2:47 pm
“However, Nietzsche was clear that only an elite few were capable of thriving without religion. The rest would either wallow in despair or else attach themselves to a charismatic figure who provides soothing answers. Bloom is clearly an elitist himself but he also expresses the view that philosophers should not always tell the truth and criticizes Socrates on this very ground. So if Bloom is a Nietzschean, he is horrified enough about the consequences of this belief system that he won’t present it for mass consumption in his book.
“Regardless, though, Bloom clearly considers Nietzsche an important thinker to be reckoned with.”
I think you can stop with the “IFs.” Bloom WAS a Nietzschean and he reads Nietzsche on these very grounds.
The real “Truth” — what Nietzsche and Heidegger taught — was not lovable but dangerous. Bloom taught it was playing with fire, something capable of destroying liberal democracy and bringing Nazism to the masses. As such only elite philosophers could be trusted with this sacred flame.
As to the Bible, Great Books and the “Truth,” Bloom made it clear that, in order for those books to work their magic folks had to believe in them as containing Truth. But the philosopher (i.e., he, Leo Strauss and their cohort) knows they don’t. Hence, real philosophy being suitable for only an elite “few.”
April 3rd, 2012 | 4:19 pm
Mr. Rowe- I stand corrected. Professor Bloom was an atheist. I don’t think that changes anything else I said about him.
I recall clearly that, in the late Eighties, both the secular left AND the religious right regarded Professor Bloom as an advocate for traditional values. The left hated him for it, of course, while the right embraced him. But I was baffled at how anyone who’d read the book could misunderstand him so completely.
I eventually conclued, as Michael Kinsley did, that hardly anybody WAS reading the book in its entirety. Rather, liberal atheists and religios conservatives alike read the easy chapters (on rock and roll and campus activism) and formed snap impressions of him based on those chapters.
BOTH sides assumed that anyone who hated rock music and a watered down literary canon MUST be a religious conservative! And both sides were ridiculously wrong.
April 3rd, 2012 | 7:33 pm
When I read that book years ago, I got to the end and was left with a big, fat, hollow ‘Why’? Why do you care about any of this, Bloom? What is it about the intellectual collapse of society that bugs you? An Aristotelian or a Thomist might mourn over millions of college students getting vaccinated against the Truth, or an American patriot might mourn over the collapse of his country’s once-lofty ideals – but, you? All your ranting amounts, finally, to what could best be called petty annoyance.
You don’t *like* rock and roll. You don’t like it that kids have no idea what other people have thought over thousands of years of civilization. But you give no reason for your dislike more profound than personal preference.
I kept waiting for a chapter where he says: And here’s what we do about it. Here’s where we need to be going, and here’s how we get there. Instead, the book sort of just peters out, like a tired old man.
Then again, I haven’t cracked it open for 25 years – maybe I’m misremembering.
April 3rd, 2012 | 10:36 pm
“What is it about the intellectual collapse of society that bugs you?”
You are not misremembering — Bloom certainly does not provide much in the way of a program of reform or action plan.
He certainly expresses a fear that the intellectual foundations of American liberal democracy are crumbling but then he proceeds to take a whack at them himself in the middle of the book by extensively promoting Rousseau’s and Nietzsche’s attacks on Enlightenment liberalism.
He certainly seems to suggest in some places that a better foundation would be provided by the ancient Greeks but then if real philosophy is atheistic, aren’t all those elite thinkers he is trying to train in the university destined to find Nietzsche more attractive anyway?
One can imagine Bloom promoting a multi-track education system where the masses read the Bible and Shakespeare, undergraduates at elite universities read the Great Books (it’s never clear why) and then the chosen few who are bound to become philosophers or political scientists delve into Strauss and Nietzsche. But this is all very tough to decipher from the book.
April 4th, 2012 | 10:33 am
Strauss owes much to Nietzsche, but to equate Straussianism (or Bloom’s thinking) to nihilism is a complete misreading.
The introduction to Bloom’s excellent translation of The Republic demonstrates against the wilder conspiracy theories about Strauss — the grandfather of the Jewish neocons, the anti-democratic atheists, the cabal of elitism and esoterica — with a straightforward argument showing Plato’s idea of the philosopher king was intended to be regarded as a self-evident absurdity: philosophers could not be kings, nor kings philosophers, therefore what shall we do in this sub-utopian circumstance? Straussians became hard-headed defenders of the American experiment for selfish reasons, to be left alone with their books. They have no designs on the world.
It is true that Strauss and the Straussians don’t have much interest in the political philosophy of Christianity, but that doesn’t make them nihilists. Pre-Christian restorationists, maybe. Lovers of wisdom above God, perhaps. But not stone-atheists like the latter day clowns, Dawkins et al.
Yes, Straussians are interpreters and students of Nietzsche, but like Nietzsche himself (or Machiavelli, who used to dress up in ancient Roman drag to literally converse with his peers), they are dreamers of supermen in the absence of the gods, the harbingers and proclaimers of greatness, but not greatness themselves. The longer the philologist spends time in the library, the more he misidentifies with idols beyond himself, and he begins adopting delusions of grandeur. These delusions are the source of their elitism. “Esoteric” elitism is a peculiar disease of such jabber-mouthed, book-worm nebbishes in perpetual adoration of the übermenschen they could never be.
A mature development includes getting over Ayn Rand in one’s teens, Nietzsche in one’s 20s, and Strauss in one’s 30s. If you’re lucky you then come back to a second childhood and rediscover Who was there before the foundations of the universe and Who will endure all the convoluted human-intellectual machinations: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
All of these modern, mortal philosophasters wrestled with and reacted to the Nazerene directly, as in Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, or indirectly, as in Straussians tracing a history of thought neatly around the Christian juggernaut, as if Christendom didn’t happen and Jesus didn’t effect the first, last, and only “Transvaluation of All Values.” He’s their Voldemort, their He Who Shall Not Be Named. He’s GWB’s favorite political philosopher, and GWB’s naive spontaneity was right.
Christianity is “Platonism for the people,” and Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind is Straussianism for the people.
April 4th, 2012 | 11:40 am
I am desperately trying to figure out from the article and the comments here whether this books should be required reading for all good, intelligent persons or whether the Index of Forbidden Books should be revived so that this book can be listed on it.
April 4th, 2012 | 12:38 pm
King:
Spoken like a true gentleman. He he.
April 4th, 2012 | 12:45 pm
Mr. Nickol- I never said the book was evil- merely that, contrary to popular belief, it was NOT conservative and did NOT uphold traditional values.
At the time, practically everyone, on the Left AND the Right, assumed it was. Bloom hated rock music, current American pop culture and the destruction of the Canon in American colleges… so, obviously, he HAD to be some kind of religious, conservative zealot! What OTHER reason could there be to hate rock and roll?
Indeed, Bloom’s book was often held up along with E.D. Hirsch’s “Cultural Literacy” (a book it had NOTHING in common with) as a maniesto for a return to “The 3 R’s” and fact-based education.
That wasn’t what Bloom was about at all, but it didn’t matter. He was praised AND vilified wrongly by people who formed silly, superical impressions of who he was and what he stood for.
Again, I have little doubt that most people skipped the chapters that dwelled on Plato and on Heidegger!
April 4th, 2012 | 2:40 pm
I was in college when I read this book over 20 years ago, and it changed the lives of many of us. (His translation and commentary on Plato’s REPUBLIC, though, will remain, in my mind, Bloom’s greatest contribution to philosophy. It has a place of honor on my bookshelf next to the King James Bible, Cornford’s translation of the Theatetus, and a dog-eared Pilgrim’s Progress.)
In the politically correct 80s and early 90s, college students and professors saw virtually nothing of value in the works and ideas of dead white European men. And while the value systems of some dead white European men certainly left something to be desired, the best way to examine the big questions in life was to grapple with these amazing thinkers and writers of the Western canon – the dead white European great minds. (You can add George Eliot, although rumor has it she was not a man.)
I don’t think it really mattered to Bloom whether someone became an athiest, an agnostic, a Christian, or a Hindu, but rather that the reader struggled with the great works of the western canon as a means to live an examined life. Live a life of some restraint in your physical passions (it allows you to live in society) and unfettered openness in intellectual passions.
April 4th, 2012 | 3:29 pm
Mr. Nikol – the book hardly warrants banning – it’s a sort of intellectual curiosity, hardly intended to convince anyone of anything. The only risk the pubic runs is perhaps getting beaned by a hardcover copy flung out the widow by a frustrated Great Books grad.
Since I read the book when it first came out, and had even back then given up reading the papers much, I had only the dimmest sense that it was in any way controversial. I found it simply baffling and disappointing – here I was, a product of the sort of education it seemed Bloom was advocating, and yet he made no attempt to make the case why I should have bothered – which bothered me!
I read those books, Al – they brought me back to a belief in God and a love for Aristotle. Guess I’m not sophisticated enough for Nietzsche, I keep getting hung up on vile, nasty things he actually wrote, which makes the beauty of his secret message of – what? – tolerance? love of good literature? – hard to see.
Sorry if I’m grouchy – gave up coffee for Lent.
April 5th, 2012 | 12:33 am
Astoria – you mock those who didn’t read Bloom’s book, but I wonder if you’ve read it yourself. It opens with a frontal assault on nihilism! Bloom was an atheist, a self-confessed non-conservative, and an admirer of nihilists like Nietzsche who were serious, suffering, thoughtful men.
But there is a difference between seeing all conventions as conventions and seeing all truth as poetic superstructure created by powerful men. It’s as big a difference as saying there is no truth, so we need inspired human beings to make it up, and saying the truth is hard to see, so only inspired human beings will ever see it.
Bloom mustered all of his intellectual strength to make the argument that students were no longer being introduced to authors who had something to say about good, beautiful and eternal things. Of course, Bloom did not think Christian or conservative authors had the best arguments to make about such things, but that doesn’t make him a nihilist. It makes him a philosopher – a great-souled magnificent philosopher who for the sake of the young erotic souls of his city did battle against both nihilists and dogmatists of every strip.
Athens is not Jerusalem, but that doesn’t mean that it is Weimar.
April 5th, 2012 | 10:41 am
Athens- first, chill out! Second, I did indeed read it, and I retract nothing of what I said.
When I called Bloom a nihilist, I meant exactly what I said. However, you’re quite right to note that “nihilism” didn’t mean to Bloom what it’s come to mean to most modern Americans. To Bloom, the beginning of wisdom is to realize (as Nietzsche did) that there is no God and no higher meaning or purpose to our existence. But, importantly, AFTER realizing that, the wise man begins to seek and create his own higher meaning and purpose. To Bloom, Nietzscean despair was eventually SUPPOSED to inspire us to do great things.
What drove him crazy was how EASILY modern Western society embraced the notion that’s there’s no God and no real meaning to our lives. Far too many modern Americans skipped over the despair AND the search for purpose that Bloom hoped would ensue, and embraced what I earlier called Nihilism Lite.
Bloom had HOPED the Sixties generation, having largely shed their parents’ values, would aspire to great things. Instead, they embraced an “I’m Okay, You’re Okay, Whatever You Believe Is Cool, And Whatever You Don’t Believe Is Cool, Baby.”
To a Jerry Falwell, rock and roll is immoral, because it urges kids to do sexually immoral things. To a Bloom, rock and roll isn’t immoral, it’s a puerile waste of time, and a vapid, pitiful imitation of Nietzschean despair.
April 5th, 2012 | 6:01 pm
Astoria – all of what you say is true, but only by half. A preference for profound Nihilism to Nihilism lite is certainly present, but a deeper preference for Plato and “higher meaning and purpose,” to use your words, trumps everything. But Bloom’s pointing to those higher things is subtle and ironic and philosophic. Plus it’s atheistic, so people mistake his (and Strauss’) arguments for Nietzschean (profound) nihilism.
Also, just to be clear, “doing great things” was simply not Bloom’s primary concern. Thinking about and arguing about and loving good and eternal things – things that really exist – is the philosopher’s task. Doing is always something of an inconvenience.
All of this is very important because Bloom’s whole point was that Nietzsche and Heidegger dug the ocean that academia now swims in, so academia’s students are reared from pre-school on to presume that a return to Plato and his heirs and interlocutors is simply not worth the effort. But for Bloom the health of the soul lives and dies on just that effort. With the irony of Strauss and Socrates he tries to convince the young that maybe what everyone is telling them is wrong. Maybe Nietzsche and Heidegger were wrong. Maybe the professors and the economists are wrong. Maybe our longing for immortal things is actually a sign that immortal things really do exist.
All of these maybes are ideas that are forbidden in the academy, and not just because it is dominated by Nihilism lite. Even if we got the real deal we still would not have our Eros brought to term.
And Bloom’s goal was to nurture Eros, not because at bottom its aims are meaningless, but because it leads us up to truly good things.
This is not nihilism, but eroticism at a fever pitch.
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