Is the American mind getting dumber?

Since it became an instant best-seller in 1987, The Closing of the American Mind has become the stuff of every day academic chit-chat and has made the author, reclusive bachelor Allan Bloom, a household word among U.S. educators. Now the unofficial bible of academic conservatism, Closing provides intellectual ammunition and support to lobbying groups such as the neutral-sounding National Association of Scholars and to right-wing militants of the Dartmouth Review variety. Bloom's lengthy tract, moreover, was but the first in a series of bilious and mean-spirited polemics from and for the cultural Right, notably Charles Sykes's ProjScam and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals.'

Although much of Bloom's thinking has achieved fast and furious dissemination, it would be difficult to summarize his argument-if only because Closing is less an argument than a B-52 raid. Bloom is the Curtis LeMay of U.S. education-he carpet-bombs his enemies back to the Stone Age (or rather to Ancient Greece). Closing lets fly at the death of religion, the decline of the family, modern sexual mores, rock-and-roll music, the search for ethnic roots, our students' lack of prejudice, the Black and anti-war movements, the Berrigans, pop psychology, feminism, egalitarianism, Marxism, relativism, films, and everything that challenged the status quo in the 1960s. Black, Gender, and Peace Studies are gunned down in the same sentence (340-41). Some major intellectual figures whose work is far more substantial and enduring than is Bloom's are zapped with quick caricatures. Charles Beard and Lucien Goldmann get a snide poke or two (29, 56, 352);John Rawls's A Theory of Justice is put in the same league with Erica Jong's Fear of Flying (229); and Margaret Mead is pegged as a "sexual adventurer." (33) In his final 150 pages Bloom loses all control and luxuriates in flatulence.

To our lapsed present Bloom opposes an idealized past of traditional religion, family values, the post-War decade, the old curriculum, the Founding Fathers, social aristocracy, boy, girl dating, and even machismo. Ancient Greece is invoked with Teutonic reverence-not surprisingly, given the formative influence of Bloom's mentor, the conservative GermanJewish emigre Leo Strauss. Bloom's stance is only as expected. Conservative polemicists have their standard set of current targets and past models. QD. Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), for instance, was an attack on contemporary literary tastes and on the best-seller industry, along lines strikingly similar to Bloom's own onslaught against modern students' cultural tastes and the rock-music industry.2

The explicitly polemical chapters in Closing sparked interest in great measure because they addressed issues that were already in the air. Complaints about bad rock music, formulaic relativism, and student desensitization are common fare among professors, whatever their ideological stripe. Bloom's book happened to be around at the right time, place, and publisher's. By contrast, the chapters of Closing that set out the author's own ideas are singularly vapid and undistinguished, stale glosses on Plato and Rousseau, bloated grabbags of the tiredest textbookese. Airy and abstract, they break no new ground whatsoever in political analysis and thought. Bloom has neither eye nor ear for the concrete. As befits a professor of Political Philosophy, he writes from the position that the history of humankind is the history of political ideas.

Throughout his pages one hears the cloistered professor expounding high wisdom in the seminar room. Indeed, his moment of glory came when, during the turmoil at Cornell University in 1969, he and his students literally looked down with scorn from their tower, and continued to discuss their Plato.

Closing has to be one of the worst-written intellectual best-sellers of our time. The author's attacks have the appeal of their firepower, like the shoot-out scenes in an ordinary thriller, but when he gets to serious thinking, the prose is without melody, rhythm, or art. Banalities proliferate at a numbing rate, for example, A man who can generate visions of a cosmos and ideals by which to live is a genius. . . " (181. Emphasis in the original.) Bloom's repetitiveness is nothing short of astounding-certain of his notions are restated five, ten, twenty times. The rambling reiterations can turn comically nonsensical, as in this bold query: "The issue is: Does a society based on reason necessarily make un-reasonable demands on reason, or does it approach more closely to reason and submit to the ministrations of the reasonable?" (291) 1 am reminded of one of those convoluted sentences Cervantes cites from the chivalric romances that dried up Don Quixote's brain: "The reason for the unreason with which you trust my reason, so weakens my reason that with reason I complain of your beauty.,,3

Closing is such a muddle, so poorly conceived and ill-thought-out, so rambling and diffuse, that its exceptionally low literary quality must be established before we focus on the specific content of its purported wisdom.

From the outset Bloom dwells on the extent to which the notion that 'truth is relative "' is now common doctrine, a buzzword really, among students. (25) This is Closing's recurrent refrain, the lament that underlies its arguments from start to finish, whether the manifest subject be politics, the curriculum, or sex. Bloom is not the first to have noted this climate of opinion. Writers and academics from every field and stance have touched upon the predominance of the attitude not only among students but throughout the larger society. Closing more or less attributes this ideological drift to the deplorable influence of certain European thinkersNietzsche, Heidegger, the villainous Marx, and particularly the deconstructionists. Like the anxious seekers in Poe's "The Purloined Letter," however, Bloom is looking too hard for what is at hand. The origins and development of current relativistic thinking and feeling are far more English and American than he seems ready to concede.

The intellectual foundations can be traced to John Locke. As has been demonstrated elsewhere, Lockean philosophy is at the heart of U.S. political thought and practice, while Lockean epistemology pervades our theoretical and scientific activities .4 In the same way, the legendary American tolerance toward all opinions can be traced to A Letter Concerning Toleration, wherein Locke argues for equal rights of assembly and worship to all religious faiths, whether "Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Armenians, Quakers," liberties that indeed are to be denied neither to "pagan nor Mahometan nor Jew. (The one group from whom Locke withholds such rights, significantly, is atheists.) In the secular ethos of the modern American university, one could very easily substitute Locke's catalog of sects with the proliferating intellectual "approaches" and "methods" of our time.

The United States is unique among nations in having endured neither an official state Church nor traditions of anticlericalism, but instead a bewildering array of autonomous churches and sects, each one of them claiming to have the best available doctrine while tacitly conceding to other denominations the civil right to make equal claims. As Christian morality recedes, Lockean individualism has become secular doctrine, permeating American civic lore. "Everybody's got his own opinion," "It all depends on your point of view, " and Who's to say? " (an early version of which actually appears in Locke's Letter) are classic American street formulas. Every American professor of Ethics knows the experience of a young student raising his/her hand the first day of class and announcing, "It's up to the individual to decide what's right! " or All we've got to do is follow our consciences! " The arguments for "States' Rights" that are typically deployed by American conservatives are a political avatar of this set of ideas.

The doctrine of the "marketplace of ideas," originating with Mill's essay On Liberty, is all but orthodoxy in U.S. cultural and media institutions. Among the articles of faith in American journalism is the ideal of "balanced coverage," whereby there are "two sides to every story." The pragmatic criterion of truth had its "classic " and richest expression in the prose of William James, but in its generalized, everyday form it has stressed results, while scanting principles and perhaps truth itself Cultural Relativism, the theory as well as the phrase, was first formulated not by a European but an American anthropologist, Ruth Benedict. Finally, with WASP nativism discredited and the "melting pot" no longer a convincing enough slogan, the more enlightened strands of U.S. domestic political discourse-even when on the lips of our most reactionary leaders-extol an America of multifarious local communities, immigrant traditions, and pluralistic diversity.

The relativism of today's students, so distasteful to Bloom, is actually part of their socialization into American life, and is further reinforced at their elite campuses. In the area of everyday academic practice, they are frequently encouraged to write whatever they believe, so long as it is cogently argued and sufficiently documented. The pluralist ideology they are to absorb also has a diachronic dimension, one that is routinely defended and publicly endorsed by many of our highest-placed academic officials. The view is well articulated in a somewhat bland report entitled The Humanities in American Life (1980), the product of a sizeable Commission that included presidents of the Rockefeller Foundation and of Yale, Chicago, and Stanford Universities, along with, for example, Robert Coles, William Gass, and Lewis Thomas.

Some crucial quotations: "The humanities do not impose any single set of normative values, whether moral, social, or aesthetic; rather, as a record of the ideals that have guided men and women in the past, they give historical perspectives ... [They] bring to life the ideal of cultural pluralism by expanding the number of perspectives from which questions of value may be viewed. " "Students must be encouraged to look to the past not for dogmatic answers but for perspective. [6] So much for the Nietzschean origins of undergraduate relativism.

Though the matter has not been empirically studied, I believe that the persistence and growth of relativistic ideologies is also furthered by the need in American ruling circles to differentiate our ways from those of the USSR and other Marxist entities. The objective is to demonstrate that, whereas "they" are closed-minded, absolutist, and monolithic, "we" are open-minded, tolerant, and pluralistic. As happens to all governing ideologies, absurd things can be done and said in official relativism's name. Creationists make their case not by claiming to be "right" but by criticizing scientific "dogma," describing Evolution as "just another theory," and demanding "balance" and "equal time" in biology class. Jingoists justify our neocolonial wars as noble battles for our right to protest against those wars. During the 1960s, when I argued with hawks that U.S. Indochina policy was evil and immoral, they accused me not of being unpatriotic or wrong but, what is worse, of being dogmatic and closed-minded.

Bloom asserts that "Nietzsche and Heidegger really are the moving forces in America today-without our knowing it! "' It is true that certain Continental thinkers have become a considerable presence in the Humanities halls at our elite universities, mostly via the deconstructionist fashion that captivated the minds of young scholars during the 1970s. But the Derrideans and their Yale acolytes have been unduly blamed for our current incarnations of relativism. Their triumph in American literary studies is yet one more instance of what happens when European ideas and arts traverse the Atlantic. In France, where both the State and the leftist opposition have traditionally been centralist and authoritarian in their structure, Derridean doctrines of "decentering," dissemination," and "freeplay" pose a counter-utopia, an ideology of contestation before hierarchic privilege and its claims to transcendental signification."

In the American ideological setting, by contrast, such thinking-if we ignore Derrida's philosophical idiom for a moment-has a comfortable and footloose familiarity to it, is in fact next to "normal." Both liberal and conservative segments of our society take pride in America's decentralized ways, while media and fashion sectors are noted for their lack of adherence to any set signs or original presences. As Terry Eagleton points out, "The modest disownment of theory, method, and system; the revulsion from the dominative, totalizing, and unequivocally denotative; the privileging of plurality and heterogeneity, the recurrent gestures of hesitation and indeterminacy, the devotion to gliding and process, ....the distaste for the definitive-it is not difficult to see why such an idiom should become so quickly absorbed within the Anglo-Saxon academies." [9]

Without intending to, our deconstructors have become yet one more chapter in that ongoing American tradition of pluralistic tolerance, of skepticism toward ultimate truths or univocal orthodoxy. What happened with Max Weber, psychoanalysis, and existentialism in previous decades has been the lot of deconstruction: it has been absorbed and domesticated to provide further sustenance to the U.S. status quo. Not accidentally, publicists for deconstruction such as Barbara Johnson or Stanley Fish have taken to defending the doctrine as "a denial of what both the left and the right hold dear."[10] American centrism wins again.

Finally, it might be noted that our frenzied consumer culture fosters an attitude whereby truth and principles matter less than the more immediate question, "Does it feel good? " As Gerald Graff observes in Literature against Itself, we live in a society where boredom is more conspicuous than exploitation, and where authority encourages hedonistic consumption and a flabby, end-of-ideology tolerance." Such a system produces individuals characterized by "a diffuse, unfocussed, protean self which cannot define issues in any determinate way. A confused self is as good as an indoctrinated self from the ruling-class point of view, though the situation is complicated by the fact that the 'ruling class' often shares the confusion. " Foreigners do often remark on how confused the mind of most Americans seems to be. Graff's volume, incidentally, examines our relativist malaise with a sharp and urgent diagnosis that is a good deal clearer and more fruitful than Bloom's sneering broadside."

The dizzying relativism of our intellectual subculture, then, has Anglo-American roots and is a distinctly American episode. What the deconstructors have done is to give European finesse, German weightiness, and Parisian garb to a local formation, much as designers have been doing in other branches of U.S. industry. One could argue that the widespread relativism of this historical moment is either the democratic fruition of our tradition of tolerance-or its general debasement. But however we may assess the current cross-breeds, their genesis is Lockean-without most Americans realizing it, Bloom included.

Relativism, Bloom also suggests, is the chief reason for the abysmal ignorance of many U.S. students, whose lack of familiarity with the basics of history and geography, and sparse reading acquaintance with the world's classics, are now legend. To my view, however, the prime cause of cultural illiteracy in America-both in the schools and out-is something more singular and monolithic that exists firmly implanted in American minds. I am referring to the official, triumphalistvision of America's past and present that is taught in the classrooms and obsessively reinforced by the media.

Some all-too-familiar snippets of this American nationalist doctrine: America is the greatest country in the world! Every-bodywants to be like America! Americans are free to do, be, or say whatever they want. America is a middle-class centrist country, dedicated to fighting extremes of left and right across the globe. America is number one! America is the best! " And so forth.

It is an obvious fairy-tale, made up of less-than-half-truths and much romanticism, but it is agreed upon by millions of Americans whose acceptance of it is reinforced every day. This triumphalist ideology is the chief obstacle to general cultural literacy and serious thinking in the United States. If American children are hearing it from all quarters that theirs is "the greatest country in the world" and that no place else measures up, how can they be expected to regard the rest of our planet-Europe included-with much interest? If virtually every other nation is perceived as pre-us," or as poised to emigrate to us, or as a failure, or as unfair, what hopes can there be for a process of respectful learning of world geography and history? A triumphalist and powerful culture is inherently anticultural, subtly crippling, even delusional in its complacency.

What none of Bloom's reviewers has cared to note is just how profoundly conventional a book Closing is, how much it is an exponent of crude American triumphalism. These are the confessions of a conformist mind, a true believer in the status quo. His outbursts of nationalism, chauvinism, and ordinary jingoism are the most febrile sort of flag-waving. A sampling: "Our story is the majestic and triumphant march of the principle of freedom and equality. " 97) "The exploration and discovery of the New World produced, among other wonders, the United States." (163) "For the poor, the weak, the oppressed, [the United States] is the promise of salvation. " (167) "The responsibility for the fate of freedom in the world has devolved upon our regime." (382) Bloom regards the Founding Fathers as "a race of heroes" and alludes to them with a religious awe comparable to that fabled reverence of the Soviets for their Lenin. Charles Beard's and Carl Becker's critical historicism is taken to task for having seen "the Founders [as] racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests" (29), and for Bloom such an attitude weakens "our convictions of the truth or superiority of American principles and our heroes." (56)

The less attractive features of U.S. history are either ignored, are placed in the mouths of those critics whom he mocks, or are glibly exorcised by Bloom. The question of slavery, as he sees it, was already settled with the Declaration of Independence. Black slavery was an aberration that had to be extinguished, not a permanent feature of our national life. " (248) One remembers that our southern Cotton Gulag endured and expanded for the first eighty years of our nation's existence-longer than the current age of the Soviet Union ! Despite his passionate conservatism on all of today's topics, Bloom claims for his ground (indeed, purports to enshrine) that American utopia-the Center standing midway between, and "intimidated and put on the defensive" by the irrational extremes of Left and Right, which in turn are really identical. This leads him to some bizarre juxtapositions. The Woodstock festival is compared to a Nuremberg rally (314); paid vacations for workers legislated by Leon Blum's Popular Front are likened to Hitler's occupying the Rhineland (239); and-that old chestnut-Marxism is directly linked to Fascism. (221) One particularly disingenuous passage relates the New Left's "ideal of openness, lack of ethnocentricity" to the romantic defense of segregation by Southern racists. (32)

Bloom's comments on feminism are among the most bilious portions of Closing. There is cliche aplenty-"The women's movement is not founded on nature." (I 00) And the contradictions are egregious: after spilling much ink to lament self-centeredness and the passing of family values, he dismisses paternity leaves as "contrived and ridiculous." (131) Even women's complaints of rape arouse the author's mockery and sarcasm-one of his chief ways of dealing with issues he doesn't like. Bloom's deliberate choice of pronouns further underscores his dogged resistance: Closingemploys "he, "him," and "his" exclusively, even when it is evident that the referents of his reflections and recollections are women.

This prepares us for the most hysterical part of Closing Bloom's last 100 pages, in which he vents his full wrath at the student movement of the 1960s and the curricular changes that have since followed. Here Bloom pulls out all the stops: the student radicals and their supporters were like neo-Nazis, and the University was wrecked. What happened to Germany in the thirties is what has happened and is happening everywhere," (312) bringing "the collapse of the entire American educational structure." (321) Throughout his pages Bloom demonstrates a numbing narrowness of vision. He vents fear, rage, and loathing, but all but ignores the war that sparked the biggest campus protests in U.S. history and led to several student deaths. None of this figures in the sixties of Allan Bloom.

Indeed, the event still stoking Bloom's ire is not the killings at Kent State but what he calls "the guns at Cornell," when some black students there took over Willard Straight Hall and armed themselves, attracting nationwide attention, consternation, and anger. And just as Vietnam plays no part at all in Bloom's history of the 1960s, in his version of the commotion at Cornell the black students' actions were unmotivated and without provocation. Before the takeover, though, a cross had been burned in front of a dormitory for black women. As Robert J. Harris, Director of the African Studies Center further recalls, "Members of a white fraternity came and tried to recapture the building. A fight broke out. The white students said, We'll be back, and you better be ready.' At that point, the black students secured guns. It wasn't their intention to go in armed.[12]

So relentless and absolute is Bloom in his condemnation of subsequent curricular developments that it is impossible to give a balanced summary of his position. There are no nuances to his argument. The window to Europe," for Bloom, Was always the resource of free and oppressed spirits in America." (320) It goes without saying that Bloom's Europe is not the left-wing Europe of anarchist, socialist, and Green struggles. To the extent that the newer humanistic disciplines focus instead on the sordid underside of Western civilization-on slavery, colonialism, and racism-or seek out and formulate alternative traditions from elsewhere, to Bloom they are silly, ill-considered, and just plain wrong, wrong, wrong - His sound and fury notwithstanding, Bloom's tale is an oft-told one. Gerald Graff in Professing Literature gives us an insightful history of the constant changes that have taken place in academic literary studies over the past 150 years. [13] Graff vividly reminds us of the aridity, pedantry, and sheer boredom so characteristic of much of the Greco-Latin curriculum that was the educational core of the Classical college. Thereafter each new major shift in content and approach was met with conservative hostility. The importation of Germanic philology, the teaching of Modernism and of American literature, and the emergence of the New Criticism all aroused initial resistance and ridicule; they in turn would be institutionalized and finally become the new orthodoxy. Bloom's lamentations are but a recent installment in an ongoing process. What is distinctive is his unforgiving rage at the on-campus conflicts that led to such paradigm shifts.

Bloom's rejection of all curricular change is hardly new. An illustratively forebear is Irving Babbitt, the conservative humanist whose chief claim to fame today is his having been a mentor of T.S. Eliot. Babbitt's Literature and the American College reads like an earlier and more genteel version of Bloom's Closing,14 but the parallels between the two men are also personal: both Classicists who revere ancient Greece; both authors of studies of Rousseau, to whom they attribute an inordinate sway over modern life (Babbit saw the Swiss philosopher as a forefather of fascism); both unhappy with ideas that are, as Babbitt quipped, "Made in Germany." (73) Babbitt has harsh words for "the socialistic dreamer and the ....latest philosophical fad. " (3-4)

Frankly yearning for "the old curriculum," Babbitt sees the current college motto as "study what you like." (105) He laments that some students will read Horace, others only Ibsen (95); he rails at "a French instructor in an Eastern college" who assigns The Three Musketeers in class (184); and he notes with displeasure that a "hodge-podge of second-rate French and German novels" is replacing "the masterpieces of Greece and Rome," for, to Babbitt, "the only good authors are dead authors." (197) He sees no point to "look for poetry at all among gondoliers,'[15] and inveighs against a Bachelor's degree made up of electives "that may range from boiler-making to Bulgarian." (97) From these academic changes Babbitt draws a familiar apocalyptic inference: "the American college ... is threatened at present with utter extinction." (209)

Much like Bloom, who looks upon his students as an "aristocracy" whose souls he strives to shape, Babbitt sought "to induce our future Harrimans and Rockefellers to liberalize their own souls. [16] The chief difference between the two authors has to do with their respective ideological moments. Babbitt, the self-styled Tory and would-be Dr. Johnson, was fundamentally anti-democratic in outlook, and his disciple T.S. Eliot went so far as to emigrate to the old country, there evolving into a professional Tory and anti-democratic poet and critic.

In Babbitt's time, of course, the question of democracy had not yet been settled. Today, by contrast, even the most extreme conservatives claim to favor democracy (so long as there isn't too much of it). Hence Bloom's prolix divagations on "democracy" that impress one more for their airiness than their erudition. "Democracy" for Bloom is a code word for the U.S. status quo, just as "socialism" in Moscow until recently has meant the Soviet path. Such homely entities as our ailing political-party system and our enormous voter-abstention rate scarcely violate Bloom's mental hothouse, a never-never land into which conglomerates, takeovers, inequalities of wealth, uncontrolled real-estate development, budget cuts in human services, black poverty, and homelessness never intrude. Issues of power are the ugly preserve of communism. In the West, says Bloom, "Man, if he is sensible, separates himself from nature and becomes its master or conqueror. This was and still is the prevailing habit of liberal democracies, with their peace, gentleness, prosperity, productivity, and applied science." (177) One may well ignore the fatuity of such rhetoric and assume that Bloom really believes the European scramble for Africa, the U.S. Manifest Destiny policy, and the various struggles for social equality in the West were marked by peace and gentleness.

Much of The Closing of the American Mind is autobiographical, but the person we see taking shape in its narrative pages is smaller than life, a kind of academic holy fool for whom the (private, elite, American) university is the universe. Only two things that matter seem to have happened in the Bildungsroman of Allan Bloom: his exhilaration at discovering the Great Books at the University of Chicago, and his horror at the student unrest at Cornell. All else is secondary. The result is this book: so slight in its vital and existential range, so disproportionate in physical bulk to its intellectual and spiritual substance. In due time Closing-will be looked upon as a media event, its author as a minor crank.

NOTES

1. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). Charles J. Sykes, ProjScam: Professors and the demise of Higher Education (Washington D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988). Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1990). Page references to Bloom will be made in the body of the text.

2. QD. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932).

3. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. J.M. Cohen (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 31-32.

4. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York; Harcourt Brace, 1955). See also Gene H. Bell-Villada, "Invisible Anti-Marxism: What Happens when American Liberals Read Latin American Leftists," Humanities in Society, vol. 6, nos. 2 & 3 (Spring/Summer 1983), pp. 179-94.

5. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), p. 56.

6. Commission on the Humanities, The Humanities in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press,1981), pp. 29, 30, and 48.

7. Conversation with Alvin P. Sonoff, U.S. News and World Report, May 11, 1987, p. 78.

8. As noted in Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 54 fn.

9. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1984) p. 98.

10. Richard Bernstein, "The de Man Affair, " New York Times (The Week in Review), July 17, 1988, p. 6. The quotation is from Ms. Johnson.

11. Gerald Graff, Literature against Itself.- Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 213. I should also take the liberty to mention my novel, The Carlos Chadwick Mystery (Albuquerque: Amador Publishers, 1990), which deals in part with the process whereby educated Americans, both students and adults, learn and live their relativist formulas.

12. Cited in Constance L. Hays, "How an Era Empowered Students," New York Times, Education Life section, January 8, 1989, p. 19.

13. Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).

14. Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908. Rpt. Augustus M. Kelley, 1972). Page references from this volume will be included within the body of the text.

15. As cited in Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of American Prose Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942, rpt. 1970), p. 304.

16. Cited in Kazin, p. 299.

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