Closing of the American Mind Read online

  Romantic poets and other edifying theorists of the nineteenth century had it wrong—poets and novelists will never be the legislators and teachers of mankind. That poets—artists—should give new eyes to human beings, inducing them to view the world differently, converting them from fixed modes of experience, is ambition enough, if one must offer a purposive account of the artist’s project. What makes that project singularly difficult is the disheartening expansion of trained ignorance and bad thought. For to put the matter at its baldest, we live in a thought-world, and the thinking has gone very bad indeed. Therefore the artist, whether or not he views himself as an intellectual, is involved in thought-struggles. Thinking alone will never cure what ails him, and any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately. For me, the university has been the place of divestiture where I am able to find help in the laborious task of discarding bad thought. It was at the university that I began to work through the modern ideologies, Capitalist as well as Marxist, and the psychologies, the social and historical theories, as well as the philosophies (logical positivism, naturalism, existentialism, etc.). Shedding superfluities so that my mental body could recover its ability to breathe, and protecting the root-simplicities of being, I have never viewed the university as a sanctuary or shelter from “the outer world.” Life in a strictly academic village, in isolation from a great turbulent city, would have been a torment to me. So I have never been, as a “radical” Central European novelist recently called me, a “campus writer.” Rather, I have trained myself to pick up the endless variations on radical and right-wing themes so that I have become able (not an enviable skill) to detect the untreated sewage odors of a century of revolutionary rhetoric or, from another direction, to identify in Gore Vidal’s recent outburst of “original” geopolitics nothing other than the Hearst Sunday Supplement theme of the “Yellow Peril,” the odor of which is no more pleasant now than it was in the thirties. There is nothing at all new in the fiery posturing of these agitational and “activist” writers. If they were able to come up with something of their own, the universities would not hold their monopoly on the intellectual life.

  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. Liberal democracy in its generosity made this possible, but by consenting to play an active or “positive,” a 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. Any proposed reforms of liberal education which might bring the university into conflict with the whole of the U.S.A. are unthinkable. Increasingly, the people “inside” are identical in their appetites and motives with the people “outside” the university. This is what I take Bloom to be saying, and if he were making a polemical statement merely it would be easy enough to set aside. What makes it formidably serious is the accurate historical background accompanying the argument. He explains with an admirable command of political theory how all this came to be, how modern democracy originated, what Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the other philosophers of enlightenment intended, and how their intentions succeeded or failed.

  The heat of the dispute between Left and Right has grown so fierce in the last decade that the habits of civilized discourse have suffered a scorching. Antagonists seem no longer to listen to one another. It would be a pity if intelligent adversaries were not to read Professor Bloom’s book with disinterested attention. It makes an important statement and deserves careful study. What it provides, whether or not one agrees with its conclusions, is an indispensable guide for discussion, not a mere skimming of the tradition, but a completely articulated, historically accurate summary, a trustworthy resumé of the development of the higher mental life in the democratic U.S.A.

  SAUL BELLOW

  Preface

  This essay—a meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their education—is written from the perspective of a teacher. Such a perspective, although it has grave limitations and is accompanied by dangerous temptations, is a privileged one. The teacher, particularly the teacher dedicated to liberal education, must constantly try to look toward the goal of human completeness and back at the natures of his students here and now, ever seeking to understand the former and to assess the capacities of the latter to approach it. Attention to the young, knowing what their hungers are and what they can digest, is the essence of the craft. One must spy out and elicit those hungers. For there is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display. What each generation is can be best discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of mankind. This in turn can best be discovered in each generation’s tastes, amusements, and especially angers (this is above all true in an age that prides itself on calm self-awareness). Particularly revealing are the various impostors whose business it is to appeal to the young. These culture peddlers have the strongest of motives for finding out the appetites of the young—so they are useful guides into the labyrinths of the spirit of the times.

  The teacher’s standpoint is not arbitrary. It is neither simply dependent on what students think they want or happen to be in this place or time, nor is it imposed on him by the demands of a particular society or the vagaries of the market. Although much effort has been expended in trying to prove that the teacher is always the agent of such forces, in fact he is, willy-nilly, guided by the awareness, or the divination, that there is a human nature, and that assisting its fulfillment is his task. He does not come to this by way of abstractions or complicated reasoning. He sees it in the eyes of his students. Those students are only potential, but potential points beyond itself; and this is the source of the hope, almost always disappointed but ever renascent, that man is not just a creature of accident, chained to and formed by the particular cave in which he is born. Midwifery—i.e., the delivery of real babies of which not the midwife but nature is the cause—describes teaching more adequately than does the word socialization. The birth of a robust child, independent of the midwife, is the teacher’s true joy, a pleasure far more effective in motivating him than any disinterested moral duty would be, his primary experience of a contemplation more satisfying than any action. No real teacher can doubt that his task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice. The vision of what that nature is may be clouded, the teacher may be more or less limited, but his activity is solicited by something beyond him that at the same time provides him with a standard for judging his students’ capacity and achievement. Moreover there is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech. The soul, so the teacher must think, may at the outset of education require extrinsic rewards and punishments to motivate its activity; but in the end that activity is its own reward and is self-sufficient.

  These are the reasons that help to explain the perversity of an adult who prefers the company of youths to that of grownups. He prefers the promising “might be” to the defective “is.” Such an adult is subject to many temptations—particularly vanity and the desire to propagandize rather than teach—and the very activity brings with it the danger of preferring teaching to knowing, of adapting oneself to what the students can or want to learn, of knowing oneself only by one’s students.

  Thus, teaching can be a threat to philosophy because philosophizing is a solitary quest, and he who pursues it must never look to an audience. But it is too much to ask that teachers be philosophers, and a bit of attachment to one’s audience is almost inevitable. And if it is well resisted, the very vice can turn into something of a virtue and encourage philosophizing. Fascinati
on with one’s students leads to an awareness of the various kinds of soul and their various capacities for truth and error as well as learning. Such experience is a condition of investigating the question, “What is man?,” in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs.

  A liberal education means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern. Despite all the efforts to pervert it (a few of which will be discussed in this book), the question that every young person asks, “Who am I?,” the powerful urge to follow the Delphic command, “Know thyself,” which is born in each of us, means in the first place “What is man?” And in our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers and thinking about them. Liberal education provides access to these alternatives, many of which go against the grain of our nature or our times. The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration. Although it is foolish to believe that book learning is anything like the whole of education, it is always necessary, particularly in ages when there is a poverty of living examples of the possible high human types. And book learning is most of what a teacher can give—properly administered in an atmosphere in which its relation to life is plausible. Life will happen to his students. The most he can hope is that what he might give will inform life. Most students will be content with what our present considers relevant; others will have a spirit of enthusiasm that subsides as family and ambition provide them with other objects of interest; a small number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous. It is for these last, especially, that liberal education exists. They become the models for the use of the noblest human faculties and hence are benefactors to all of us, more for what they are than for what they do. Without their presence (and, one should add, without their being respectable), no society—no matter how rich or comfortable, no matter how technically adept or full of tender sentiments—can be called civilized.

  From the teacher’s standpoint, thus understood, I have for more than thirty years, with the most intense interest, watched and listened to students. What they bring to their higher education, in passions, curiosities, longings, and especially previous experience, has changed; and there-with the task of educating them has changed. In this book I am attempting to make a contribution to understanding this generation. I am not moralizing; I no more want to be Jeremiah than Pollyanna. More than anything else, this book is to be taken as a report from the front. The reader can judge for himself the gravity of our situation. Every age has its problems, and I do not claim that things were wonderful in the past. I am describing our present situation and do not intend any comparison with the past to be used as grounds for congratulating or blaming ourselves but only for the sake of clarifying what counts for us and what is special in our situation.

  A word about my “sample” in this study. It consists of thousands of students of comparatively high intelligence, materially and spiritually free to do pretty much what they want with the few years of college they are privileged to have—in short, the kind of young persons who populate the twenty or thirty best universities. There are other kinds of students whom circumstances of one sort or another prevent from having the freedom required to pursue a liberal education. They have their own needs and may very well have very different characters from those I describe here. My sample, whatever its limits, has the advantage of concentrating on those who are most likely to take advantage of a liberal education and to have the greatest moral and intellectual effect on the nation. It is sometimes said that these advantaged youths have less need of our attention and resources, that they already have enough. But they, above all, most need education, inasmuch as the greatest talents are most difficult to perfect, and the more complex the nature the more susceptible it is to perversion.

  There is no need to prove the importance of education; but it should be remarked that for modern nations, 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.

  This book has concentrated my mind on the experiences of a lifetime of teaching. Because my career has been an unusually happy one, gratitude is the leading sentiment evoked in reviewing it. My acknowledgments, therefore, reflect contributions to that total experience rather than to this particular book. So above all, I must thank all the students to whom I have had the privilege of teaching classic texts for more than thirty years, especially those I came to know well and from whom I learned so much about the questions discussed here.

  Among them are those old students, now very independent thinkers and friends, who have told me of their experiences and observations and helped me interpret mine: Christopher J. Bruell, Hillel G. Fradkin, James H. Nichols, Jr., Clifford Orwin, Thomas L. Pangle, Abram N. Shulsky, Nathan and Susan Tarcov. David S. Bolotin, in particular, responded to my thesis and in turn persuaded me of its seriousness. All of them contributed to and tempered my enthusiasms, each in his own special way. Michael Z. Wu has assisted me enormously with his sharp insight and criticism.

  Among my colleagues with whom I share conversation and students, I want to make mention of Saul Bellow and Werner J. Dannhauser. The former, with his special generosity, entered into my thoughts and encouraged me in paths I had never before taken; the latter, my intellectual companion throughout my adult life, undertook as usual to read my manuscript and gave me the benefit of his penetration and honesty.

  In the preparation of the manuscript, Judy Chernick, Terese Denov, and Erica Aronson worked as loyal friends with total reliability, making the most boring phases in the production of a book seem exciting. I have been particularly happy in my editors, Robert Asahina, of Simon and Schuster, and Bernard de Fallois, of Editions Julliard, who pushed me to write the book and then spent more time working on it than I could have imagined. The Earhart Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation have supported me as teacher and scholar for a long time, and I am very grateful to their officers.

  Finally, I want to express my admiration for Allan P. Sindler, who has been for me the model of the selfless university man. His lifelong behavior proves that the enterprise is still possible and worthwhile.

  I must say, and not only pro forma, that my mention of these persons in no way implies that they endorse my views.

  ALLAN BLOOM

  Chicago, May 1986

  Introduction:

  Our Virtue

  There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don’t think about. The students’ backgrounds are as various as America can provide. Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged—a combination of disbelief and indignation: “Are you an absolutist?,” the only alternative they know, uttered in the same tone as “Are you a monarchist?” or “Do you really believe in witches?” This latter leads into the in
dignation, for someone who believes in witches might well be a witch-hunter or a Salem judge. The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. 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. Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times. The true believer is the real danger. The study of history and of 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 the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all.

  The students, of course, cannot defend their opinion. It is something with which they have been indoctrinated. The best they can do is point out all the opinions and cultures there are and have been. What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others? If I pose the routine questions designed to confute them and make them think, such as, “If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?,” they either remain silent or reply that the British should never have been there in the first place. It is not that they know very much about other nations, or about their own. The purpose of their education is not to make them scholars but to provide them with a moral virtue—openness.

  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. In some nations the goal was the pious person, in others the warlike, in others the industrious. Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle. Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime. Over the history of our republic, there have obviously been changes of opinion as to what kind of man is best for our regime. We began with the model of the rational and industrious man, who was honest, respected the laws, and was dedicated to the family (his own family—what has in its decay been dubbed the nuclear family). Above all he was to know the rights doctrine; the Constitution, which embodied it; and American history, which presented and celebrated the founding of a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” A powerful attachment to the letter and the spirit of the Declaration of Independence gently conveyed, appealing to each man’s reason, was the goal of the education of democratic man. This called for something very different from the kinds of attachment required for traditional communities where myth and passion as well as severe discipline, authority, and the extended family produced an instinctive, unqualified, even fanatic patriotism, unlike the reflected, rational, calm, even self-interested loyalty—not so much to the country but to the form of government and its rational principles—required in the United States. This was an entirely new experiment in politics, and with it came a new education. This education has evolved in the last half-century from the education of democratic man to the education of the democratic personality.