by Allan Bloom
But good reviews, even ecstatic reviews, aren’t sufficient to sell a book, as any number of highly praised authors you’ve never heard of would be happy to tell you. Something else was happening here, but we didn’t know what it was. James Atlas, in the New York Times Magazine, conjectured that the book acted as a kind of adult continuing education class: “It appeals to the student in us all.” Bloom’s editor at Simon & Schuster said the book tapped a large reservoir of underserved book buyers eager for intelligent discussion of profound issues. Louis Menand, a literature professor at Princeton and CUNY, was rather more sardonic in the New Republic: “It gratifies our wish to think ill of our culture (a wish that is a permanent feature of modernity) without thinking ill of ourselves.”
Menand’s review was part of a second surge of notices, far more critical than the first. It was the Revenge of the Eggheads, and when at last it came you couldn’t help but wonder what took them so long. The Wall Street Journal’s rapturous review arrived late enough to note how odd the early praise had been, sociologically and politically, coming as it did from the “cultural establishment” that had been squarely in Bloom’s crosshairs: “Many of the reviewers who have praised Mr. Bloom’s book have not faced up to the consequences of Mr. Bloom’s ideas.” The college president in the Sunday Times was singled out as an especially unlikely booster. His rave review for the book “shows no indication that the institution over which he presides stands fundamentally indicted by it.” And not only this or that institution: Bloom was accusing an entire generation of humanities professors of academic dereliction.
They took the book as a personal affront and reacted accordingly. “Bad reviews are one thing,” James Atlas wrote. “The responses to Bloom’s book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers.” Tactics differed. There were attacks on Bloom’s scholarship, his philosophical skill, and the empirical support for his broader claims. There were also sarcasm, invective, caricature, shaming, and, inevitably then as now, accusations of elitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Perhaps the most celebrated rebuttal to Closing, considered by many of Bloom’s critics to be definitive, was one of the calmest and most measured. Written by the Harvard classicist Martha Nussbaum, it was a lengthy piece even by the standards of the magazine in which it appeared, the New York Review of Books. Her disputes with Bloom over the the ancient texts were too obscure for a layman to adjudicate, but to my mind her characterization of his general argument wasn’t quite accurate and in places discredited itself. She tells us, for example, that in Closing “Bloom presents himself to us as a profoundly religious man.” You could have fooled me. His preeminent teacher, the philosopher Leo Strauss, liked to make the distinction between Athens and Jerusalem—a life of philosophy versus a life of faith. After a few approving nods toward the Bible, The Closing of the American Mind shows Bloom to have been an Athens man all the way (not to mention a Jew, a homosexual, and a Hoosier. Truly, they broke the mold . . .).
The most subtle of Nussbaum’s arguments poked at a contradiction lying half-buried in the book. Bloom opens with a patriotic celebration of America’s foundation in natural rights, the guarantee of equality; by the end of the book he seems to argue that the only way to save America from its present course is for universities to recommit to promoting the philosophical life, a life accessible, he frankly acknowledges, only to a chosen few. The contradiction, if that’s what it is, doesn’t cripple his other arguments, but Nussbaum and the other second-wave academics thought it exposed an elitist, antidemocratic agenda that could easily darken into something much spookier—autocracy or worse, a new (or very old) kind of authoritarian rule.
One observer estimated that more than two hundred reviews of Closing were eventually published, and scores of these, in obscure quarterlies and highbrow opinion magazines alike, elaborated the theme of Bloom as authoritarian menace. In Harpers, the political scientist Benjamin Barber called the book “a most enticing, a most subtle, a most learned, a most dangerous tract.” Americans were too susceptible to a “Philosopher Despot” like Bloom, Barber wrote. “Anxious about the loss of fixed points, wishing for simpler, more orderly times,” they found in his work “a new Book of Truth for an era after God.” This was a common assertion but a weak one, even on its own terms. In accusing Bloom of authoritarian tendencies, Barber and the others exposed their own horror at the common folk and made you wonder about their own faith in democracy. Who knew Americans were so easily duped? Toss them a few quotes from Herodotus and bitch about their college kids and they’ll think you’ve given them the Book of Truth. Even Franco had to work harder than that! Maybe this whole idea of “government by the people” needs to be rethought . . .
In time the academic establishment’s horror of Bloom grew too vast for mere paper and ink to contain. Conferences were held to declare him anathema. At one of these, in Manhattan, the associate headmaster of the Dalton School called the book “Hitleresque.” Richard Bernstein, then a reporter for the Times, chronicled a gathering sponsored by Duke and the University of North Carolina, where Bloom, though not in attendance, was “derided, scorned and laughed at” by a large group of humanities professors. “In some respects,” Bernstein wrote, “the scene in North Carolina last weekend recalled the daily ‘minute of hatred’ in George Orwell’s 1984, when citizens are required to rise and hurl invective at pictures of a man known only as Goldstein, the Great Enemy of the state.”
It’s worth noting that Duke’s conference was held nearly a year and a half after Bloom’s book was published. Some hatreds need more than a minute to burn themselves out. And among the establishment—deans and department chairs, the grim-faced apparatchiks at the American Council on Education and the American Association of University Professors—Bloom remained a pariah for the rest of what was left of his life. But he was a jaunty and cheerful pariah, as Bellow shows, for there were compensations: appearing endlessly on TV, accepting invitations to Chequers from Mrs. Thatcher and to the White House from President Reagan, and laughing in his kimono all the way to la banque.
I wonder whether all this fuss will seem bizarre to new and younger readers of The Closing of the American Mind. It’s useful to recall the world Bloom and his book broke into and riled so. In material ways, the United States of America of 1987 seems as remote as Republican Rome. Our national wealth has more than tripled in the last twenty-five years. The digital revolution, with its upending of the habits and patterns of everyday life, was just getting underway. Music lovers delighted in the portability and convenience of their brick-sized Walkmans, never imagining the tiny wonders they would be slipping into their shirtpockets a decade hence. Cars, on the other hand, seem to have been roughly half their present size. You couldn’t carry around a telephone unless you yanked it off the wall. Nintendo was as sophisticated as gaming systems came. And nobody used the word “gaming system.”
Culturally, the country fretted. Culturally, of course, all countries, or some segments of them, are always fretting, and have been doing so since Cicero grieved over O tempora, O mores, up to and beyond Yeats’s insistence that the center cannot hold. But by the end of the 1980s in the United States, there were numbers to underscore the worry. In the previous thirty years, violent crime had increased 500 percent, the divorce rate had doubled, the teen suicide rate had tripled, and the number of “illegitimate births” (this was the last era when you could use the term) had increased 400 percent.
Beyond the numbers, the worriers readily found signs of the culture’s degradation, if not its imminent collapse. On TV, Geraldo Rivera, Jerry Springer, and Sally Jesse Raphael had introduced a new kind of freak show that proved enormously popular, banishing modesty and discretion and making exhibitionism a virtue, qualifying adulterers and wifebeaters and cross dressers to strut their hour upon the stage set. (Eerie fact: exactly nine months after Closing’s publication date, Snooki Polizzi was born.) Popular fiction chronicled a generation of pampered youth lost to anomie a
nd cocaine. As the Iran-Contra scandal shook the executive branch, pundits discovered among the people a loss of faith in their institutions. A devastating crash on Wall Street was credited to greed unchecked by law or moral obligation.
And as if all that weren’t sufficient cause for alarm, one final word: Madonna.
The skittish American public in 1987 was well-prepped soil for a message like Bloom’s. It helped that his subject, colleges and universities, shared in the general unease and were in fact one cause of it. Test scores at all levels of schooling, but particularly college entrance exams, had been falling since the late 1960s. Two generations earlier the GI Bill had begun to democratize higher education by making it available to cohorts that in earlier times would have never thought it necessary for a fulfilling life. To accommodate the swells of new students, and to absorb the subsidies that followed them, schools vastly expanded their housing stock, increased the number of classrooms, and, crucially, widened the range of their fields of study.
The purpose of a four-year liberal arts program—defended by Bloom as an exploration of the big questions that life presents to the fully conscious human being—became confused. What was the point of a bachelor of arts degree? Was it to plumb the depths and origins of Western civilization, which had after all invented the university, and to develop the student spiritually and morally? Or was the point to set the kid up to get a cushy job? Humanists in our universities lost confidence in the traditional answer. And their departments, the seat of liberal arts, suffered in the confusion, losing students to the social sciences and programs devoted to professional training, such as pre-law or business. The humanities responded by either aping the professional curriculum or shrinking still further into the theory and abstraction that Bloom devastatingly describes. Core courses were dropped. Teachers of literature or philosophy had difficulty describing what they did for a living, or why.
By the time Bloom’s book was released the crisis in the humanities was acknowledged by everyone except the people who worked in the humanities. Parents in particular began to wonder why their college-age children were taking classes called “Hip-Hop Eshu: Queen Bitch 101” (at Syracuse University) or coming home after four years with degrees in “Peace Studies” that cost $100,000. Phrases that were used without irony by many profs in the humanities—“politically correct” (good) and “Dead White Males” (bad)—were captured by their critics and turned into shorthand for the leftwing orthodoxy that filled the vacuum in the liberal arts.
The crisis was made political fodder. The Reagan administration took a special interest and an especially acerbic tone. Lynne Cheney, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Secretary of Education, William Bennett, led the dyspeptic chorus. Both held doctorates in the humanities, which enhanced their influence with the higher-ed establishment not at all. When Cheney echoed Bloom in a widely publicized report—criticizing efforts by humanities departments to make themselves “relevant” by treating “great books as little more than the political rationalizations of dominant groups”—she earned many multiple minutes of hate all on her own.
With the publication of Closing, Bloom was placed alongside Bellow, Bennett, and later the jurist and Jeremiah, Robert Bork, in a convenient journalistic category: the Doom and Gloomers, or the Killer B’s, or the Grumpy Old Men. (Cheney, alphabetically disqualified to serve with the Killer B’s, was nevertheless an honorary Grump.) But this grouping wasn’t fair to Bloom, not entirely—and it wasn’t fair to the arguments developed in the book, which had a subtlety and depth that journalism and partisan politics can seldom capture.
Bloom was never a movement conservative. In electoral politics he was a moderately liberal Democrat, and more liberal still in personal and social matters. Unlike Bennett or Cheney, who considered themselves champions of ordinary American bourgeois life, Bloom viewed it with a disdain that runs just below the book’s surface. He was no fan of the free market or the ceaseless getting and striving that it encourages. He worried that the life that awaited students after college would be just as enervating as their dismal and purposeless education. And he wasn’t above invoking a brand-name cliché to drive the point home. In their “Brooks Brothers suits,” he writes, “they will want to get ahead and live comfortably. But this life is as empty and false as the one they left behind.” Elsewhere he speaks of the “intellectual deserts” of middle-class living and “the dreary professional training that awaits [liberal arts students] after the baccalaureate.”
There is no element of moral uplift in his brief against modern life. Discussing the collapse of the traditional family, which has only accelerated since his time, he writes: “I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should or could go back to them.” Bloom’s discussion of rock music (see pages 68–81 if you’ve forgotten, though how could you?) was always adduced as Exhibit A in the charge of fuddy-duddyism—to most people under the age of thirty-five, his complaints sounded no more informed or intelligent than the bellowing of the old crank next door: “Turn it down!” But his case against rock was entirely his own; he worried that it deadened the passion required for real education. “My concern here,” he wrote, “is not the moral effects of this music—whether it leads to sex, violence, or drugs.” This placed Allan Bloom to the left of Tipper Gore, at the time an energetic crusader against the depredations of Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard.
In the last quarter-century, the reader will notice, Bloom’s book has grown a few whiskers. Anachronisms are unavoidable. He wrote before the population of modernity’s Holy Trinity—Marx, Freud, and Darwin—reduced by two-thirds. Marx lost his allure, at least nominally, after the collapse of the murderous regimes that claimed to have been built from his ideas. Freud was demoted from scientist to cultural observer, and an unreliable one besides. Some of Bloom’s language is outdated: no professor today could use the word “Oriental” for “Asian” and long survive. He objects to squishy nonce words, but the examples he uses—“commitment,” “values,” “life-style”—are now so deeply embedded in everyday speech that no amount of ridicule will dislodge them. He’s lucky he didn’t live to see the infinitely elastic use of the now-meaningless word “issues.” I was touched by his quaint mention of “Mack the Knife” as an example of American life’s homogenizing effects: mass marketed by Louis Armstrong (I assume he couldn’t bring himself to mention Bobby Darin), Brecht’s leftist agitprop “becomes less dangerous, though no less corrupt.” What would Bloom have made of the taming of the Village People’s “YMCA”—a tribute to the joys of shower-room sodomy transformed into a surefire crowd-pleaser at middle-school pep rallies? The controversy over “affirmative action,” which he treats at length, was settled by the subtler logic of “diversity.” And the book gives little notice to the arrival on campus of gay rights, easily the most consequential social movement of the last three decades.
But I’m surprised by how few the anachronisms are. Most of Bloom’s criticisms still apply. I can think of lots of reasons why The Closing of the American Mind deserves as many readers as it earned in the eighties—Bloom’s sly wit and the torrential energy of his prose are worth the price of admission, in my opinion—but one carries a special urgency. The trends he tagged in higher education in 1987 have only intensified: toward weaker academic requirements for students, greater specialization in the departments, a rigid orthodoxy in the university’s politics and cultural life. The university we face today is still the one he described, only more so.
At a minimum, what Bloom demands of us in response is awareness—thoughtfulness. He hated unthinking conformity above all. The contemporary university appalled him because it had conformed to the frivolous culture that surrounds it and from which it was meant to stand apart. The cheap relativism it absorbed led inevitably to the undoing of the liberal arts. The humanities retreated from the traditional ways of teaching and learning when humanists stopped believing the effort could reveal any truths about the perplexit
ies of life. In liberal education, relativism is a universal corrosive.1 No discipline can survive it. If there’s no truth, finally, why study the work of dead people who were deluded enough to think there was? And without the pursuit of what’s finally true, higher education becomes post-secondary professional training—that’s if we’re lucky; a four-year booze cruise if we’re not.
If I had reread The Closing of the American Mind ten years ago, when my own children were themselves under ten, I confess I would have thought Bloom’s portrait of educational decline was overwrought. But then they grew up and went off to school.
Recall the passage on page 337. A freshman arrives on campus. “He finds a democracy of disciplines,” Bloom wrote. “This democracy is really an anarchy because there are no recognized rules and no legitimate titles to rule. In short, there is no vision, nor is there a set of competing visions, of what an educated human being is.” In the end the freshman will likely give up on a liberal education, opting for a major that will get him hired when he graduates and “picking up in elective courses a little of whatever is thought to make one cultured.”
This observation from twenty-five years ago describes what a freshman encounters at a moderately selective university today, and with modest adjustments, even at smaller colleges that say they specialize in the liberal arts. It is what my own family found. Poring over the catalog of courses in the weeks before my son enrolled at our big state university (which I have come to think of, for reasons soon to become clear, as BSU), we discovered that no survey classes were available to him in American history, English literature, the history of science, ancient or modern philosophy. His “general education” requirements could be satisfied by a scattering of electives, none related to any other. He was required to enroll in a writing class, which was good. The writing classes offered were “Mad Men and American Society,” “A History of the Sixties,” and “Intro to Queer Theory.” Which was not.
