topics: |  usa | education | history

Exerpts

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 which does
not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling
display.... 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.... Without their presence, no society-no matter how
rich or comfortable, no matter how technically adept or full of
tender sentiments, can be called civilized.

... one should never forget that Socrates was not a professor,
that he was put to death, and that the love of wisdom survived,
partly because of his individual example.

First radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the
privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted
the development of a higher and more independent life within
democratic society. Parents can no longer control the atmosphere
of the home and have lost even the will to do so. With great
subtlety and energy, television enters not only the room, but also
the tastes of old and young alike, appealing to the immediately
pleasant and subverting whatever does not conform to it.

American Openness results in uniformity

[page 34] Actually openness results in American
conformism - out there in the rest of the world is a drab
diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here
we can create all the life-styles we want. Our openness means we
do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is
a great closing. No longer is there a hope that there are great
wise men in other places and times who can reveal the truth about
life - except for the few remaining young people who look for a
quick fix from a guru. . . . None of this concerns those who
promote the new curriculum.

[page 337] The practical effects of unwillingness to think
positively about the contents of a liberal education are on the
one hand, to ensure that all the vulgarities of the world outside
the university will flourish within it, and, on the other, to
impose a much harsher and more illiberal necessity on the student
- the one given by the imperial imperious demands of the
specialized disciplines unfiltered by unifying thought.

We need history, not to tell us what happened, or to explain the
past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain and make a
future possible.

Only in the Western nations, i.e. those influenced by Greek
philosophy, is there some willingness to doubt the identification
of the good with one's own way.  . . . What we are really doing is
applying a Western prejudice -- which we covertly take to indicate
the superiority of our culture -- and deforming the evidence of
those other cultures to attest to its validity.  The scientific
study of other cultures is almost exclusively a Western
phenomenon, and in its own origin was obviously connected with the
search for new and better ways, or at least for validation of the
hope that our own culture really is the better way . . .

Other reviews

In his elegant essay, "The Closing of the American Mind," the late
Allan Bloom, the conservative philosopher, remarked that his
students had almost no intimate sense of evil. The only reaction
the students would give to that word was to speak of the
Holocaust. Evil was something that happened overseas and to
another generation.
- http://www.pbs.org/newshour/essays/september00/rodriguez-confession_9-27.html

Sexuality on campus

Sex: Bloom says that sexual liberation could be the recognition
that sexual passion is no longer dangerous in us and that it is
safer to give it free course than to risk rebellion. The
liberation, however, favoured the young more than the old, and the
beautiful more than the ugly, which has lead to such an
overemphasis on sex in our everyday lives. Sexual passion is no
longer anything magical and does not include the illusion of
eternity. It is just a overrated fulfilling of physical needs.

Separateness: the breakdown of the family is made possible by
individualism. "Romantic love is now as alien to us as
knight-errantry."

Divorce: Everyone loves themselves most but want others to love
them more than they love themselves. "To children, the voluntary
separation of parents seems worse than their deaths precisely
because it is voluntary -- children do not realise that parents
have right to their own lives; they think they have a right to
total attention and they believe their parents must live for
them. Children of divorced parents "have rigid frameworks about
what is right and wrong and how they ought to live. [...] All this
is a thine veneer over boundless seas of rage, doubt and fear."
Bloom speaks of psychologists most of who indulge in "self-serving
lies" and "hypocrises" expressed in a pseudoscientific jargon:
"Modern psychology at its best has a questionable understanding of
the soul. It has no place for the natural superiority of the
philosophic life, and no understanding of education."

Love: Young people today are practical Kantians: "whatever is
tainted with lust or pleasure cannot be moral." The ideology of
young people, the attitude that a serious person does not want to
force an authoritarian pattern on others and their future, so
sensible and in harmony in a liberal society, indicates a definite
lack of passion. The ideology stems not from really respecting the
partners' subjective; rather it comes from a supression of
feeling, and anxiety about getting hurt. There is no longer Romeo
and Juliet. Passionate friendship and love are no longer within
our grasp since they "require notions of soul and nature that, for
a mixture of theoretical and political reasons, we cannot even
consider."

Eros: "The eroticism of our students is lame. It is not the divine
madness as Socrates praised;" "The rhetoric of campus gays
confirms this. After all the demands and the complaints against
the existing order -- `don't discriminate against us; don't
legislate morality; don't put a policeman in every bedroom;
respect our orientation' --they fall back into the empty talk
about finding life-styles." This is not to be taken as a
homophobic attack -- Bloom is partial to no one and lambasts a wide
variety of lifestyles.

Bloom lashes out against feminism, which he claims is a enemy to
the vitality of the classic texts. He is sarcastic when he says
"But all literature up to today is sexist." Using classic texts as
evidence of the misunderstanding of woman's nature and the history
of injustice to it will not let us learn anything from it. It
destroys the beauty of the text which was not written for such a
purpose. "The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision
and strengthens our most fatal tendency -- the belief that the here
and now is all there is."  -
http://www.ram.org/ramblings/philosophy/closing_1.html