It’s been almost two years now since Chicago’s (or at least Hyde Park’s) own cantankerous pedagogue–Allan Bloom–was the talk of the nation, his best-selling The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students the publishing phenomenon of the decade. The professor’s book was widely read and widely praised for grappling with “America’s spiritual malaise” (in the words of the publisher)–but also often damned for its snobbish elitism and antidemocratic subtext. Some praised its elevated deliberations and marveled that a book that included a chapter entitled “From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede” should be consumed in such numbers. Others protested his fulminations against today’s college students (passionless “souls without longing,” Bloom calls them in a phrase that provided his original title for the book), rock music (which “has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire”), feminism (abetted by “relentless propaganda on radio and television and in the press,” feminism seeks to dismantle “the souls of men–their ambitious, warlike, protective, possessive character . . . the passion of attachment and loyalty”), affirmative action (“the source of what I fear is a long-term deterioration of the relations between the races”), and the 60s (“an unmitigated disaster”). The storm of discussion and debate has largely passed now, although the book still sells steadily in its paper edition. Maybe now is a good time to inquire into what the Bloom phenomenon has been all about.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
There are criticisms that could be made of Stone’s selection policies. There are at least a couple of important responses that are neither included nor listed in the bibliography (those by Maria Margaronis in the Voice Literary Supplement and Dennis H. Wrong in the New York Times Book Review). And Stone has included some dull and unenlightening essays apparently written for this volume (by William R. Marty, Timothy Fuller, and Gregory B. Smith).
But there’s a larger question: is a collection of the immediate responses to Bloom’s book what’s most needed now? Couldn’t the Bloom phenomenon, now that we have a little distance, bear some examination along cultural-historical lines? More valuable, perhaps, would be an attempt to answer the question many of us were asking at the time, even as the justifiable charges of elitism, sexism, and racism were flying: why were the crotchety complaints and quasi-philosophical musings of an obscure professor so popular? Was the book simply another index of the Reagan era, or were deeper recesses of the educated public’s mind-set being revealed? Unfortunately, Stone, a former student of Bloom’s, isn’t really prepared to answer questions like these. An enthusiast rather than a critic, and certainly not a cultural historian, he’s more interested in celebrating the phenomenon than explaining it.
Small wonder Bloom has often been accused of snobbery and elitism. But it gets worse. Although Bloom thinks institutions of higher learning are useful to society, he believes the converse relation is more important. “Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it,” he writes. Rather, it’s the society that ought to be “ministerial,” that should exist for the sake of the university.
Included in Stone’s anthology, for example, are a couple of religionists who decry Bloom’s apparent atheism. More arresting are those who accuse him of ideological failings as a true American man of the right. Paul Gottfried finds him “at bottom a welfare state Whig who welcomes the spread of modern progressive ideals” (such as liberal democracy and secularism). Charles Kesler takes him to task for a failure to hail the Reagan-era “counterrevolution” or some of its concomitants such as “the revival of Protestant evangelicism and the new prominence of country music.” Harry V. Jaffa (coauthor with Bloom of Shakespeare’s Politics) charges him with neglecting the “so-called ‘gay rights’ movement,” which “has emerged as the most radical and sinister challenge, not merely to sexual morality, but to all morality” (this because it represents “the ultimate repudiation of nature, and therewith the ground of all morality”). Actually this last charge is a bit unfair, since Bloom, who regards feminism as a revolt against nature, does say “the fact that there is an open homosexual presence”–with rights, yet!–“tells us much about current university life.”
The passionlessness, the relativism he points to, is all there. Even his much-maligned chapter on rock has its insights, at least in pointing to the singular role music plays in the lives of today’s youth. And it’s true that there’s a terrible lack of direction, an uncenteredness, among people today (I feel it myself). Rolling Stone writer William Greider, attempting to confute Bloom’s attacks on this point (in an essay reprinted in Stone), manages to demonstrate them: “The smart young people I know today have a brainy hipness that people like Bloom can’t handle. . . . If I suggested to these young people that they were searching for the Good, the True and the Beautiful, they would laugh. They study philosophy, they would say, only because it is a challenging mind game. If Plato nourishes the soul, so does Vanna White.” You don’t have to hold any quasi-religious conceptions of the “Good” and so forth to see this as a horrible sort of soullessness.
Essays on The Closing of the American Mind, edited by Robert L. Stone, Chicago Review Press, $11.95 paper.
