The Closing of the American Mind
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987)
For the first time in four hundred years, it seems possible and imperative to begin all over again, to try to figure out what Plato was talking about, because it might be the best thing available. (p. 310)
During the last several decades of the 1900s, careful professors observed a progressive trend among their students. To be precise, pupils became progressively stupid. Nice, tolerant, and skeptical, fresh undergraduates increasingly embraced their ignorance with ironic, self-conscious indifference– gently rejecting extremes, embracing new identities, avoiding traditional prejudices, lacking both significant likes and dislikes.
Simultaneously, the university– once a temple of the soul– became the most political, intolerant, frivolous, self-indulgent, retrograde element in modern society, an institutional champion of both unreality and unreason. If this is a fair judgment of the current idiocracy, our question becomes: what will happen to regimes founded on reason, such as the United States, when most of their citizens reject the possibility of reason? This includes the brightest types, the creators of theory who set the conceptual patterns that lesser minds can only imitate. More importantly, given rational regimes don’t seek self-destruction, what made our current culture, or should I say, counterculture, possible?
The Closing of the American Mind gives one of the best contemporary defenses of a liberal education. What is a liberal education? Or, to be more accurate– what *was* a liberal education? This feels like writing an obituary, since in 2010 the American mind is no longer closing; I fear it is firmly closed.
The humanities show that life has a melody, its own rhythms, boundaries, and proportions. If we can apprehend such proportions, then rationality includes insight into ends, understanding the human situation as the human situation. It is one thing to have the answers to all of the questions; it is a higher order of wisdom to have the questions for all of the answers, knowing the array of alternatives. By showing us life as it can be lived through history, fiction, art, and so forth, we learn of an outside, a broader horizon, and become liberated from the here and now. Our vision opens to the full range of human types, exposing the heights and the depths, the perfections and limitations, the heroes and villains, the good and the evil. Liberal education perfects desire, transfiguring coarse sensuality into the sacred, the bold, and the erotic.
In contrast, a dreary product of modern education may look at a painting by Rembrandt and only see modern art– abstract forms and disassociated colors, without expression of personality. The most she will say is, “I like his use of color.” (Color? I suppose we also like Eliot’s use of the alphabet.) Without an alternative to looking inward, the pupil never learns to look outward; terrified of being duped, the pupil never learns to love. Love, after all, is a two term relation. We can love truth, beauty, ourselves, others, our home, distant lands. Bloom asks, “Are we lovers anymore?” Without a principle of selection, those that love everyone, by that fact, love no one. Something important may have been cut out of our souls. Describing his students, Bloom remarked that
“Relationships,” not love affairs, are what they have. Love suggests something wonderful, exciting, positive and firmly seated in the passions. A relationship is gray, amorphous, suggestive of a project, without a given content, and tentative. You work at a relationship, whereas love takes care of itself. In a relationship the difficulties come first, and there is a search for common grounds. Love presents illusions of perfection to the imagination and is forgetful of all the natural fissures in human connection. About relationships there is ceaseless anxious talk, the kind one cannot help overhearing in student hangouts or restaurants frequented by men and women who are “involved” with one another, the kind of obsessive prattle so marvelously captured in old Nichols and May routines or Woody Allen films. (p. 125)
All you need is love! Yet this is a strikingly different view than the circular and inward-looking love expressed by John Lennon. “Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you…” We’ll make sense of Lennon before we finish, I promise. But first, what is the American mind in relation to the humanities?
While French thought consists of a dialogue between two national types, the Cartesian and the Pascalian, Tocqueville once remarked that Americans, almost never reading a page of Descartes, are natural Cartesians. Few are willing to take experts and authorities on faith alone; most want to judge the world through their own experience. As a consequence, tradition is not valued as tradition, but because it gives us models for discussion. Old insights can remain perennially fresh. Compare the village hall in my hometown in New Lenox, Illinois, with the city hall constructed in London. The New Lenox hall, with its Jeffersonian, neo-classical style, is five years newer than the frivolous onion. Just as Americans have more spiritual affinity with Descartes than Pascal, they also share more with John Locke than Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Americans are Lockeans: recognizing that work is necessary (no longing for a nonexistent Eden), and will produce well-being; following their natural inclinations moderately, not because they possess the virtue of moderation but because their passions are balanced and they recognize the reasonableness of that; respecting the rights of others so that theirs will be respected; obeying the law because they made it in their own interest. From the point of view of God or heroes, all this is not very inspiring. But for the poor, the weak, the oppressed– the overwhelming majority of mankind– it is the promise of salvation. As Leo Strauss put it, the moderns “built on low but solid ground.” (p. 167)
The American mind also has universal, in addition to foundational, instincts. Most nationalities have a tribal mentality– their literature, their art, their tradition. Europeans in particular, believing they have heard everything, tend to be suckers for the experimental. The American mind, if we can still find it, includes everything– on its bookshelf rests Dante and Goethe, Shakespeare and Homer.
Consider the appeal of cowboy films in the American imagination. The protagonist, on the frontier, is without external authorities to come to his aid. His integrity in the face of moral confusion rests on adhering to moral principles. This is why George W. Bush was re-elected in America, much to the disdain of others around the globe who believe only the refined should lead. But such optimism is starting to sound folksy and even cheesy to most Americans. Some suspect something sinister is afoot. Many brights are terrified of the simple, the plain, the clear, the ordinary, lest they be dupes. There *must* be, out of metaphysical necessity, root causes, secret forces behind the scenes– the corporations, Christian dominionists, the military-industrial complex. This bizarre crazy-talk finds itself in the mouths of nice, gentle, intelligent people. Can our family, friends, and neighbors get everything systematically wrong about their family, friends, and neighbors, and in such epic proportions? How?
It was a combination of social and philosophical change. Let’s start with social change first.
After the horror of two world wars, educators resolved to do their part in preventing future conflagrations. If we could design and produce a new human type– the open-minded citizen– there would no longer stand any obstacles to peace, prosperity, and community. Such a citizen would be permissive, unprejudiced, receptive, tolerant, forgiving, and all-embracing. If humanity treats everything as if it has equal value, then what will we all fight about?
John Rawls is almost a parody of this tendency, writing hundreds of pages to persuade men, and proposing a scheme of government that would force them, not to despise anyone. In A Theory of Justice, he writes that the physicist or the poet should not look down on the man who spends his life counting blades of grass or performing any other frivolous or corrupt activity. Indeed, he should be esteemed, since esteem from others, as opposed to self-esteem, is a basic need of all men. So indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is discrimination. This folly means that men are not permitted to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for such a discovery is coeval with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one. (p. 30)
Indiscriminateness as a moral imperative. This is what people mean when they tell you that truth is relative, that there are no absolutes, that living in primitive savagery is just as good as living with science and technology, that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Yes, this is ignorance, willful ignorance, ignorance of a systematic variety. John Lennon can help us– he believed we could achieve a brotherhood of man. To do so, we don’t imagine great religions, great countries, and great wealth. Rather, we imagine no religions, no countries, and no possessions.
The study of history and culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all. (p. 26)
Now everything enters into clear focus. If indiscriminateness is a moral imperative, and our world is populated with inequalities, then success must be caused by cheating, while failure must be caused by oppression. When a progressive talks about root causes, this is what they mean. Without access to internal explanations– the rationality, industry, character, or virtue of a person or group of people– root causes are the only explanations value-neutral brights can use to understand the social world. This is why our nice, gentle, intelligent peers frequently hate success– it is because it is success, as failure is loved because it is failure. Some self-hating Eloi even offer themselves as willing sacrifices to the Morlocks, as if they don’t deserve security, wealth, and happiness as a complement to their efforts.
“We chose a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel.” This is the German tradition, a tradition that truly grappled with the consequences of freedom and value in a world governed by scientific law. American intellectuals naively imported the ideas of the German tradition, especially after WWII, just as American culture (what is more American than Louis Armstrong?) naively popularized Die Moritat von Mackie Messer as Mack the Knife. The cult of indiscriminateness that underlies our popular music, alogon, without articulate speech or reason, glorifying the chaotic, undirected, barbarous impulses of the soul, parallels a philosophical development.
As the afterbirth of German idealism, Nietzsche, fearlessly refusing to recoil from the consequences of his own thought, believed we have no rational soul, only a temporal self. This self is built with a bottomless, noumenal basement: the unconscious. Science reduces to history, which reduces to personal will, which reduces to the mysterious, primal, willful, chaotic, violent, active undercurrent of life driving all things. This is the ultimate form of reductionism. It leads to Heidegger’s championing of authenticity over argument, Weber’s insistence that all societal norms have a basis only in charisma, the Freudian suspicion that all reasons are rationalizations, and Marcuse’s emancipatory vision of a sexual pornotopia. Marx is kept around only because of the assurance that more Equality can make our future happen; vulgar Marxism, which is Marxism simpliciter, has too many objectivist and scientific pretensions to be taken seriously in The Movement, the permanent revolution.
If no one can know the truth, what can we turn to for guidance in life? I, me, and myself! Since all reasons are rationalizations, we must reject reason in favor of intellectual honesty. And with reason impotent, action must take the place of contemplation. This means we must create our own values and expand our consciousness. Here enters the triumph of the therapeutic, the phony self-understanding enshrined in psychobabble. If we get in touch with our feelings, then we can tap into the unconscious forces that animate us, our true selves. We can’t obtain salvation, but we can definitely cope by undertaking change rather than undergoing change. It follows that it doesn’t matter what cause we follow, as long as we are resolved, authentically and intensely committed to the causes we select. As Nietzsche put it, “A good war makes sacred any cause.”
In other words, in a great reversal of Socrates, to be one of the brights, it is demanded that we have a naive capacity to live an unexamined life. Heidegger has triumphed; identity matters more than argumentation. If someone criticizes your causes, then the most pure motive wins. Even if a hypocrite has a valid and sound argument, we can dismiss him merely on the basis of being a hypocrite, as if that trumps reasoning. A valid argument from a civilian about military policy? Well, he better sign up. A valid argument about restricting abortion from a man? He’d think differently if he had different plumbing and has no right to talk. A white man talking about race? He doesn’t know how it feels to suffer from white privilege. A rich person talking about economic policy? Same deal– he’s necessarily self-interested. And if the person making an argument happens to be in the desired social category, they’re still dismissed as brainwashed– an Uncle Tom, a woman who wants to be barefoot in the kitchen, et cetera. The Nietzscheanization of the progressives is complete. Heidegger wins.
It gets worse. If a calculating rationalist tells you that recycling wastes more resources than it conserves, or that minimum wage legislation creates unemployment, or that corporate taxes are regressive since they’re passed to consumers, don’t attempt to understand the principles involved in good faith. Rather, call your opponent brainwashed, ignorant of corporate greed, and callous and uncaring and unconcerned. Heidegger wins again.
The value-neutral philosophy designed to eliminate religious justifications of life ended up making the justification of all ideas a matter of religious conversion. “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!” “Well, then, you are lost!” Not wrong. Just lost. Such horrible dialogue is becoming increasingly commonplace. The problem is that we’re casually putting words where *thoughts* are supposed to be. We blank out, instead of listening to ourselves speak and reflecting upon it, carelessly tossing around words such as charisma (Weber), ideology (Marx), repression (Freud), life-style (Adler), and so on.
I suspect that if we were to make a law forbidding the use of any of the words on the imposing list in this section, a large part of the population would be silenced. Technical discourse would continue; but all that concerns right and wrong, happiness, and the way we ought to live, would become quite difficult to express. These words are there where thoughts should be, and their disappearance would reveal the void. The exercise would be an excellent one, for it might start people thinking about what they really believe, about what lies behind the formulas. Would “living exactly as I please” be speakable as a substitute for “life-style”? Would “my opinion” do for “values”? “My prejudices” for my “ideology”? Could “rabble-rousing” or “simply divine” stand in for “charisma”? Each of the standard words seems substantial and respectable. They appear to justify one’s tastes and deeds, and human beings need to have such justification, no matter what they may say. We have to have reason for what we do. It is the sign of our humanity and our possibility of community. I have never met a person who says, “I believe what I believe; these are just my values.” There are always arguments. (p. 238)
This is precisely what a cultural relativist contests. If everything is equal, then there is no point in having an argument! If one has a progressive theory of history, that is, if one believes history moves both in a linear and a vertical direction, then the better always follows the worse; we can believe in change because change is necessarily for the better. So why not teach the unexamined life, the openness that is open to closedness?
Everyone likes cultural relativism but wants to exempt what concerns him. The physicist wants to save his atoms; the historian his events; the moralist, his values. But they are all equally relative. If there is an escape for one truth from the flux, then there is in principle no reason why many truths are not beyond it; and then the flux, becoming, change, history or what have you is not what is fundamental, but rather, being, the immutable principle of science and philosophy. (p. 203)
But we must reject reality because it impinges on our freedom. When Nietzsche meets Mickey Mouse, we can have all things, for all people, all of the time. Welcome to nihilism, Murican-style.
