College is a formative period of life, often seen as a rite-of-passage for many young Americans, a final four-year stop before facing the inevitable specter of the “real world”. It’s often the time where openness and exposure to the outside world hit their peaks before beginning a gradual decline. We go to university, get degrees, and then get jobs—but there’s something more than that: a sense of community, of belonging, of identity. The university is where we find out who we are, how we relate to the world, and how we fit into things. At the very least, we earnestly seek/avoid these questions.
I’ve stressed in previous posts that America has a unique relationship with education—which applies likewise to college—and this unique relationship guarantees a level of controversy. Some demand for further subsidization of higher education, whether ex ante (tuition costs born by taxpayers) or ex post (forgiveness of student loans already incurred); some demand more freedom of speech, some demand less. Others allege that colleges have morphed into bastions of dogmatic and illiberal progressive thought—countered by those who insist such thought is necessary and good.
As it happens, criticism of the college system is not a new genre. Allan Bloom’s 1987 The Closing of the American Mind, illustrates this point. Many of his gripes appear as relevant today as they did then (except for the occasional reference to the Soviets). In this post, we’ll cover a few of Bloom’s key points.
A political philosopher, Bloom takes what I’ll call a humanistic approach in his work. He claims in his subtitle that the university has “impoverished the souls” of students. The focus on the soul as the inner being is central to his work. He makes no points about employment or cost/benefit analyses. He instead contends that higher education is working against students in their search for meaning.
Bloom organizes his work into three main parts. We’ll follow a similar format as we go through his ideas. In the first part of the work, he details the culture and attitudes of students of the time, and how they have been shaped in key ways.
Not Just Any Tabula Rasa
Bloom addresses the idea of the clean slate (tabula rasa in Latin) concept of a student arriving at the university “spiritually empty”, a blank slate upon which to teach. He does not endorse this concept, but does relate it to America’s lack of “national authors”. He suggests Descartes and Pascal, two Frenchmen, as poles of objectivity and revelation, respectively, and asserts an impact therefrom on French culture. By contrast, he references Tocqueville’s claim that Americans are not “a people with a book.”
To Bloom, parents were guilty of “raising” their children instead of “educating them”, and asserts that even loving and devoted parents “have nothing to give their children in the way of a vision of the world.” He ascribes this to the loss of “sacred unity” to give any parental teaching a sense of permanence.
Perhaps this is why he claims students do not read, and indeed “have lost the practice of and the taste for reading.” He details the nonplussed responses when asking students which books mean a great deal to them: “The notion of books as companions is foreign to them.” In parallel, students have no heroes, and “no longer have any image of perfect soul.”
The Rise of Music
Bloom called his age “the age of music”, in which “a very large proportion of young people…live for music.” To him, this was an unequivocally bad thing. He accuses rock music as having a singular “barbaric appeal to sexual desire—not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored.” The popularization and availability of such music thus has a clear effect: “life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.” He admits such a claim is jarring, but insists that “it may well be that a society’s greatest madness seems normal to itself,” and ascribes to the business of rock music “all the moral dignity of drug trafficking.” One can imagine the extent to which Bloom would feel similarly about modern hip hop and pop music—which has become increasingly more explicit.
Students and their Societies
Bloom credits students with a niceness typical of “democratic character when times are good.” In passing, he makes the bold claim that today’s students “live comfortably within the administrative state that has replaced politics.” Yet the very open-endedness of possibilities to these students seemed to baffle them: “They can be anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason to want to be anything in particular.” This indeterminateness shapes their relationships with each other.
His claims about race, as with all bold claims, are uncomfortably thought-provoking. On one hand, he claims that “the sensitivity to national character, sometimes known as stereotyping, has disappeared.” Yet he also insists that one group was left out of this change: black Americans. “Just at the moment when everyone else has become a ‘person’, blacks have become blacks.” He blames this greatly on the militant push toward diversity in the 1960s, in which “courses in black studies and black English”, offered as concessions to students, enabled “black students to live and study the black experience, to be comfortable, rather than be constrained by the learning accessible to man as man.” The “worst aspects” of such “separatism” are cemented in affirmative action, fueled by complicit employers willing to “accept incompetence.” He laments such policies as “the source of…long-term deterioration of the relations between the races in America.”
Regarding the sexual “revolution” of the age, Bloom alleges it exposes some hypocrisies of feminism. “Although feminism sees the position of women as a result of nurture and not nature, its crucial contention is that biology should not be destiny, and destiny is surely natural.” He calls the “tension between freedom and attachment” as the “permanent condition of man”, one which modernity has weighted toward freedom, even more than nature.
The implications for this? “In the old order, they [women] were subordinated and dependent on men; in the new order they are isolated, needing men, but not able to count on them, and hampered in the free development of their individuality.” He references Rosseau’s assertions that it was the “woman’s job to get and hold the man…because nothing else would induce him to give up his freedom in favor of the heavy duties of family.” As “women no longer wish to do this,” the consequence is “the cement that bound the family together crumbled.”
How do men respond to their souls being thus “dismantled”? “Men tend to undergo this re-education somewhat sullenly but studiously,” to avoid being called sexist and also to “keep peace with their wives and girlfriends.” Bloom admits it is possible to soften men, “but to make them ‘care’ is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail.” Feminists “object to the father’s flawed motive and ask that it be miraculously replaced by a pure one, of which they wish to make use for their own ends.” And again: “The hope is to have a happy city made up entirely of unhappy men.”
Thus Bloom fits a provocative collection of polemics into one section of his book. It’s difficult to see just how Bloom means to relate this to the point: whether such cultural conditions are a cause or a symptom of the problems he purports to illustrate. Yet either way, he surely leaves readers feeling offended, perhaps sheepish, as he turns to a detour through the course of western philosophy in part 2, which he calls “Nihilism, American Style”.
A Winding Philosophical Road
Bloom opens the discussion of philosophy with a discussion of values and values-based language, which he accuses of “preventing us from talking with any conviction about good and evil anymore.” The predictable result: “Nobody really believes in anything anymore, and everyone spends his life in frenzied work and frenzied play so as not to face the fact, not to look into the abyss.” He calls American nihilism “a mood of moodiness…nihilism without the abyss.” Going on, he forecasts as the result of “maladaptation to society” the “attempt to recover the self’s pristine state…to ‘get in touch with one’s feelings’”.
Art is to Bloom evidence of the dignity of man, in which man is “legislating to himself and to nature.” In comparing science and art: “Scientists do not prove that there are no miracles, they assume it; without this assumption there is no science.”
Predictably, at this point, he reserves choice words for cultural diversity as contributing “to the intensification and legitimization of group politics.” He goes on to discuss a conflict in Marxism: “Ideology was sharply distinguished in Marx from science, which is what Marx’s system is…however, by 1905, Lenin was speaking of Marxism as an ideology, which means that it too can make no claim to truth.”
The connections Bloom draws between these first two parts do not at once appear obvious, until he brings them together in part 3 of his work: “The University.”
The University Mission and The Battle for Philosophy
The university atmosphere was meant to be one “announcing that there are questions that ought to be addressed by everyone but are not asked in ordinary life or expected to be answered there.” University is meant as “the place where inquiry and philosophic openness come into their own.”
Bloom details the history of philosophical appeals, denoted the “gentlemen” and the “people”. When the former ruled, “the climate for philosophy was more or less salubrious”. When the latter ruled, things devolved into “religious fanaticism or vulgar utility.” Such it was in his telling for “almost two thousand years” post-Socrates. It pointed to a “hostile relationship between the prevailing passions of the philosopher and those of the demos.” The result of this? “The ancient philosophers were to a man proponents of aristocratic politics…because they thought reason should rule, and only philosophers are fully devoted to reason.”
He points to Descartes and Hobbes as offering preliminary ideas that led toward a change in philosophy’s standing in a world where a “harmony between theory and practice” led to a “world order of scientists”. Such a state could have “only one legitimate political order, founded by, on, and for science.” This system of government as the “intermediary between the scientists and the people” meant that philosophers “switched parties from the aristocratic to democratic.”
The 1960s
Such a philosophical foundation, in which Bloom goes on to describe the intellectual ferment in German universities that found its way to America, leads into a commentary on the 1960s. At this time, the American university was held in reverence by most people, but in contempt by the students. Speaking of the zeitgeist of the decade, Bloom insists “not a single book of lasting importance was produced” in this “period of dogmatic answers and trivial facts”.
At root, Bloom ascribes this to the democratic “tendency to suppress the claims of any kind of superiority…essentially by denying that there is superiority.” But at the same time, a generation of students “specialized in being the advocates of all those in America and the Third World who did not challenge their sense of superiority and who, they imagined, would accept their leadership.”
He addressed a fundamental question of education: “we must speculate on what the human potential to be fulfilled is”. He further suggests that openness of options provides more confusion than opportunity, with “competing and contradictory” fields of study leading to “bewilderment and very often demoralization”. The answer to this at many schools? To “suppress the students’ longing for liberal education by encouraging their professionalism…to make careerism the centerpiece of the university.”
Decomposition of the University
In matter-of-fact language, Bloom details the university’s disintegration into three distinct groups of disciplines. Much of this, he alleges, was brought about by the campus tumults of the 1960s.
Natural Sciences. In the wake of violent student movements, natural science (physics, biology, chemistry, engineering, etc.) was “above the battle…indifferent…they did not share a common good with the rest of us.” This is largely because their “connection with the rest of humane learning is not familial but abstract.” Again: “Since the sixties, the scientists have had les and les to say to, and to do with, their colleagues in the social sciences and humanities.” And most bluntly: “Believing that there are no real standards outside of the natural sciences, they [natural science faculty] assumed that adjustments [responses to student demands] could easily be made.” How did they justify this? By assuming that “any minority students admitted without proper qualifications would be taken care of by other departments if they did not do well in science.”
Humanities. Bloom credits the humanities with providing “hysterical supporters of the revolution”, as “passion and commitment…found their home there.” He claims humanities is in an “impossible situation…essentially involved with interpreting and transmitting old books, preserving what we call tradition, in a democratic order where tradition is not privileged.” Some of humanities’ struggles he claims from a failure of proper reading: “no one even tries to read [books] as they were once read—for the sake of finding out whether they are true.” To dodge irrelevance, the humanities are “desperate to make their subjects accord with modernity instead of a challenge to it…to make them up-to-date largely by treating them as the matter formed by some contemporary theory.” Thus “the effort to read books as their writers intended them to be read has been made into a crime.”
Social Sciences. Bloom broadly labels economics, political science, sociology, and cultural anthropology as social sciences. He warns “the temptations to alter the facts in these disciplines are enormous.” He singles out history especially: “Historians were being asked to rewrite the history of the world, and of the United States in particular, to show that nations were always conspiratorial systems of domination and exploitation.” The goal of this? To exorcise the four deadly sins of “elitism, sexism, racism…anticommunism”.
Having asserted that the natural sciences remain aloof and disparaging toward the rest of the university, Bloom goes on to describe the inherent conflict between humanities and social science. “While both social science and humanities are more or less willingly awed by natural science, they have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine.” The results of this division are “two continuous and ill-assorted strands of thought about man…There is no junction of these two roads. One must choose between them.”
Even further, he suggests the social sciences are in conflict with each other, with economics and cultural anthropology “two robust, self-sufficient, self-confident…extremes”, with political science and sociology “strung tensely between the two poles.” He goes on to criticize economics as specializing in the “rational behavior of men at peace”, with “at peace” being the critical phrase. As such, the “hopes for a unity of social science have faded.”
Regarding the rise of MBAs and pre-business, pre-medicine, pre-law degrees? “A great disaster…a diploma that is not a mark of scholarly achievement”, creating students who are “distinctively tourists in the liberal arts.”
He endorses Rosseau’s position that Plato’s Republic is “the book on education”, and insists that “we need philosophy more than ever.”
So What?
The difficult question that we must ask (but cannot fully answer) is whether we’re getting out of college what we need. This requires us to determine what our needs truly are. Bloom’s focus on the “soul” points to something deeper than the current college experience seems to offer. His work is, alas, lacking in comprehensive solutions. He rejects the autodidact’s “Great Book” approach, as if one only reads great books, one cannot tell what a great book is. But something is still missing. This calls into question part of the value proposition of university: for $100,000+, you can find yourself—but you may still be lost.