Closing of the American Mind Read online

  “IT MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT WORK OF ITS KIND BY AN AMERICAN SINCE WORLD WAR II.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND

  Allan Bloom

  “Commands one’s attention and concentrates one’s mind more effectively than any other book I can think of in the past five years.”

  —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

  “A penetrating look at the state of modern American society . . . filled to overflowing with trenchant insights into American life. . . . Required reading for every thoughtful citizen concerned with the decline of American society. . . . It will challenge you to think.”

  —The New American

  “Essential reading for anyone concerned with the state of liberal education in this society.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Important and controversial . . . could—and should—serve as a major resource in the effort to rethink the very nature and purpose of American higher education.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

  “Every chapter, if not every page, offers something delightful, something puzzling, something outrageous.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Elegant, passionate, wide-ranging. . . . His prose is rhapsodic, compelling, personal and reassuring. He writes from a deep love of history and intellectual tradition.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Graceful and grave . . . a serious-minded, sinewy and wise work.”

  —Virginia Pilot & The Ledger-Star

  “Has the density of fiction, the sting of satire, the lucidity of philosophy . . . all the compact fluidity and dazzle of Emerson’s essays.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor Book Review

  How Higher Education Has

  Failed Democracy and

  Impoverished the Souls of

  Today’s Students

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  Contents

  Foreword by Saul Bellow

  Preface

  Introduction: Our Virtue

  PART ONE. STUDENTS

  The Clean Slate

  Books

  Music

  Relationships

  Self-Centeredness

  Equality

  Race

  Sex

  Separateness

  Divorce

  Love

  Eros

  PART TWO. NIHILISM, AMERICAN STYLE

  The German Connection

  Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature

  The Self

  Creativity

  Culture

  Values

  The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa

  Our Ignorance

  PART THREE. THE UNIVERSITY

  From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede

  Tocqueville on Democratic Intellectual Life

  The Relation Between Thought and Civil Society

  The Philosophic Experience

  The Enlightenment Transformation

  Swift’s Doubts

  Rousseau’s Radicalization and the German University

  The Sixties

  The Student and the University

  Liberal Education

  The Decomposition of the University

  The Disciplines

  Conclusion

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Index

  To My Students

  Foreword

  Professor Bloom has his own way of doing things. Writing about the higher education in America, he does not observe the forms, manners and ceremonies of what is called (usually by itself) the community of scholars. Yet his credentials are irreproachable. He is the author of an excellent book on Shakespeare’s politics, and has translated Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile. It will be difficult for nettled colleagues to wave him away, and many will want to do just that, for he is shrewd and mettlesome, as well as learned, and a great observer of what Mencken would call, when he was being mean, “the higher learning.”

  But Professor Bloom is neither a debunker nor a satirist, and his conception of seriousness carries him far beyond the positions of academia. He is not addressing himself primarily to the professors. They are welcome to listen—and they will listen because they come under heavy fire—but he places himself in a larger community, invoking Socrates, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Kant more often than he does our contemporaries: “The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers … of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact, this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good. … They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately seek is to be found. … This is the meaning of the riddle of the improbable philosopher-kings. They have a true community that is exemplary for all the other communities.”

  A style of this sort will seem to modern readers marred by classical stiffness—“Truth,” “Knowers,” “the Good,” “Man”—but we can by no means deny that behind our objection to such language is a guilty consciousness of the flimsiness, and not infrequently the trashiness, of our modern talk about “values.”

  The sentences above are taken from the conclusion of Bloom’s book. Parting from his readers, he is at his most earnest. He writes in a different vein when he is discussing the power of professional economists, the separation of modern science from the “natural philosophy” that preceded it, the phenomenon called “cultural relativism,” or the real, the bottom-line, significance of an M.B.A. degree. He often flashes out provocatively and wickedly. Speaking of the place of the humanities in the universities, he calls them a “submerged old Atlantis,” to which we turn again to try to “find ourselves now that everybody else has given up.” “The humanities are like the great old Paris Flea Market where, amidst masses of junk, people with a good eye found cast away treasures. …” Or else, “They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling: … The other two divisions of the university have no use for the past …” When he is not busy with the nature of the Good, he can hit, with the best (or should I say the worst) of them, very hard. As a scholar he intends to enlighten us, and as a writer he has learned from Aristophanes and other models that enlightenment should also be enjoyable. To me, this is not the book of a professor, but that of a thinker who is willing to take the risks more frequently taken by writers. It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one’s own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal. Bloom tells us: “Throughout this book I have referred to Plato’s Republic, which is for me the book on education, because it really explains to me what I experience as a man and a teacher.” Academics, even those describing themselves as existentialists, very seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals, as persons. So Professor Bloom is a front-line fighter in the mental wars of our times, and as such, singularly congenial to me. (If he can be personal, I see no reason why I should remain the anonymous commentator.)

  In his concluding pages, Bloom tells of a studen
t who, after a reading of the Symposium, said that it was hard today to imagine the magic Athenian atmosphere, “in which friendly men, educated, lively, on a footing of equality, civilized but natural, came together and told wonderful stories about the meaning of their longing. But [adds Bloom] such experiences are always accessible. Actually, this playful discussion took place in the midst of a terrible war that Athens was destined to lose, and Aristophanes and Socrates at least could foresee that this meant the decline of Greek civilization. But they were not given to culture despair, and in these terrible political circumstances, their abandon to the joy of nature proved the viability of what is best in man, independent of accidents, of circumstance. We feel ourselves too dependent on history and culture…. What is essential about … any of the Platonic dialogues is reproducible in almost all times and places…. This thinking might be what it is all for. That’s where we are beginning to fail. But it is right under our noses, improbable but always present.”

  I take this statement very seriously and am greatly moved by it, seeing in it the seed from which my life grew. For as a Midwesterner, the son of immigrant parents, I recognized at an early age that I was called upon to decide for myself to what extent my Jewish origins, my surroundings (the accidental circumstances of Chicago), my schooling, were to be allowed to determine the course of my life. I did not intend to be wholly dependent on history and culture. Full dependency must mean that I was done for. The commonest teaching of the civilized world in our time can be stated simply: “Tell me where you come from and I will tell you what you are.” There was not a chance in the world that Chicago, with the agreement of my eagerly Americanizing extended family, would make me in its image. Before I was capable of thinking clearly, my resistance to its material weight took the form of obstinacy. I couldn’t say why I would not allow myself to become the product of an environment. But gainfulness, utility, prudence, business, had no hold on me. My mother wanted me to be a fiddler or, failing that, a rabbi. I had my choice between playing dinner music at the Palmer House or presiding over a synagogue. In traditional orthodox families small boys were taught to translate Genesis and Exodus, so I might easily have gone on to the rabbinate if the great world, the world of the streets, had not been so seductive. Besides, a life of pious observance was not for me. Anyway, I had begun at an early age to read widely, and I was quickly carried away from the ancient religion. Reluctantly, my father allowed me at seventeen to enter the university, where I was an enthusiastic (wildly excited) but erratic and contrary student. If I signed up for Economics 201, I was sure to spend all my time reading Ibsen and Shaw. Registering for a poetry course, I was soon bored by meters and stanzas, and shifted my attention to Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? My tastes and habits were those of a writer. I preferred to read poetry on my own without the benefit of lectures on the caesura. To rest my book-strained eyes I played pool and Ping-Pong at the men’s club.

  I was soon aware that in the view of advanced European thinkers, the cultural expectations of a young man from Chicago, that center of brutal materialism, were bound to be disappointed. Put together the slaughterhouses, the steel mills, the freight yards, the primitive bungalows of the industrial villages that comprised the city, the gloom of the financial district, the ballparks and prizefights, the machine politicians, the prohibition gang wars, and you had a solid cover of “Social-Darwinist” darkness, impenetrable by the rays of culture. Hopeless, in the judgment of highly refined Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians, the spokesmen for art in its most advanced modern forms. For some of these foreign observers, America had many advantages over Europe, it was more productive, more energetic, more free, largely immune from pathogenic politics and ruinous wars, but as far as art was concerned it would be better, as Wyndham Lewis put it, to have been born an Eskimo than a Minnesota Presbyterian who wanted to be a painter. Civilized Europeans, often exceptionally free from the class prejudices of their own countries, were able conveniently to lodge their not fully mastered biases in the free-for-all U.S.A. What no one was able to foresee was that all civilized countries were destined to descend to a common cosmopolitanism and that the lamentable weakening of the older branches of civilization would open fresh opportunities and free us from our dependency on history and culture—a concealed benefit of decline. There would be barbarous manifestations certainly, but there would be also the possibility of new kinds of independence.

  In this regard I find myself, as Americans have taken to saying, between a rock and a hard place. European observers sometimes classify me as a hybrid curiosity, neither fully American nor satisfactorily European, stuffed with references to the philosophers, the historians, and poets I had consumed higgledy-piggledy, in my Midwestern lair. I am of course, an autodidact, as modern writers always are. That spirited newcomer, the nineteenth-century novelist, guessed, ventured, conjectured daringly. Independent intelligence made its synthesis. Balzac declared, “The world belongs to me because I understand it.” Professor Bloom’s book makes me fear that the book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the “learned” who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.

  From a different standpoint, American readers sometimes object to a kind of foreignness in my books. I mention Old World writers, I have highbrow airs, and appear to put on the dog. I readily concede that here and there I am probably hard to read, and I am likely to become harder as the illiteracy of the public increases. It is never an easy task to take the mental measure of your readers. There are things that people should know if they are to read books at all, and out of respect for them, or to save appearances, one is apt to assume more familiarity on their part with the history of the twentieth century than is objectively justified. Besides, a certain psychic unity is always taken for granted by writers. “Others are in essence like me and I am basically like them, give or take a few minor differences.” A piece of writing is an offering. You bring it to the altar and hope it will be accepted. You pray at least that rejection will not throw you into a rage and turn you into a Cain. Perhaps naively, you produce your favorite treasures and pile them in an indiscriminate heap. Those who do not recognize their value now may do so later. And you do not always feel that you are writing for any of your contemporaries. It may well be that your true readers are not here as yet and that your books will cause them to materialize.

  There are times when I enjoy making fun of the educated American. Herzog, for instance, was meant to be a comic novel: a Ph.D. from a good American university falls apart when his wife leaves him for another man. He is taken by an epistolary fit and writes grieving, biting, ironic and rambunctious letters not only to his friends and acquaintances, but also to the great men, the giants of thought, who formed his mind. What is he to do in this moment of crisis, pull Aristotle or Spinoza from the shelf and storm through the pages looking for consolation and advice? The stricken man, as he tries to put himself together again, interpret his experience, make sense of life, becomes clearly aware of the preposterousness of such an effort. “What this country needs,” he writes at last, surrendering to the absurdity of his state, “is a good five-cent synthesis.” Here he echoes Mr. Marshall, Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President, who had said at about the time of the Great War, “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” Certain readers of Herzog complained the book was difficult. Much as they might have sympathized with the unhappy and comical history professor, they were occasionally put off by his long and erudite letters. Some felt that they were being asked to sit for a difficult exam in a survey course in intellectual history and thought it mean of me to mingle sympathy and wit with obscurity and pedantry.

  But I was making fun of pedantry!

  The reply: “If that was your purpose, you didn’t altogether succeed. Some of your readers thought you were setting up a challenge, something resembling an obstacle course, or an egghead crossword puzzle for members of MENSA.” A few may have been flattered, w
hile others resented being tested. People reserve their best thinking for their professional specialties and, next in line, for serious matters confronting the alert citizen—economics, politics, the disposal of nuclear waste, etc. The day’s work done, they want to be entertained. They can’t see why their entertainment should not simply be entertaining, and in some ways I agree, for I myself, in reading Montaigne as I sometimes do, am tempted to skip his long citations from the classics, which put my high school Latin under some strain, and it is not amusing to send oneself back to high school.

  To finish with Herzog, I meant the novel to show how little strength “higher education” had to offer a troubled man. In the end he is aware that he has had no education in the conduct of life (at the university who was there to teach him how to deal with his erotic needs, with women, with family matters?) and he returns, in the language of games, to square one—or as I put it to myself while writing the book, to some primal point of balance. Herzog’s confusion is barbarous. Well, what else can it be? But there is one point at which, assisted by his comic sense, he is able to hold fast. In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves—to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together. The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about. The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.