Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind 20 years later

20 years ago, a bombshell hit the liberal educational establishment. A little-known University of Chicago professor wrote a book that was on the summer reading list of just about everyone in the chattering classes.

The Closing of the American Mind was subtitled: “How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.”

The New Criterion, in honor of the 20th anniversary of the first appearance of this classic, devotes several essays revisiting the book in the November number. One of the things that is in short supply these days is serious criticism -- there is a lot of reviewing that goes on, but criticism requires a broadening of perspective. And it virtually demands some distance -- retrospective, if you will.

Bloom's book was itself a work of serious criticism -- albeit one that had a curious appeal to the more general reader. But then, the best serious criticism can stand the test of being exposed to the general serious reader, as opposed to the academic specialist.

Bloom's book ranged from his contemporary experiences teaching at a major elite university (drawing also on the formative moments of the student rebellion when he was teaching at Cornell) to ancient Greek philosophy to 19th century German nihilism. It brought perspective.

Of course, as with so many serious books, far more people bought it than read it. From Roger Kimball's essay:

But even the success of The Closing of the American Mind had its oddities. One side of the oddity was summed up by a cartoon in The New Yorker. It shows a bemused-looking chap in a bookstore. He is standing in front of a table piled high with the book. As he leafs through a copy, a bookseller stands by beaming and confides, “I haven’t read it, but it’s terrific.”

I have often wondered how many of those million copies sold actually found readers. Five percent? Seven? Not more, I’d wager. But the interesting thing is that it didn’t matter. Poetry, T. S. Eliot said, communicates before it is understood. Similarly, books like The Closing of the American Mind do not have to be widely read to touch a nerve and communicate their essential message.

In James Piereson's lead essay, we are reminded that one of the main themes of the book -- the importance of an education in the "great books" (i.e. the ones overwhelmingly written by dead, white males) -- was hardly a new one, since it had been addressed from within the liberal tradition since the 1930s.

What Bloom was saying was more root-and-branch, and was probably only possible because enough of a culture had developed outside of that liberal tradition that the reading public could conceive of an assault from outside that tradition without the assault being an anti-intellectual one.

Bloom, however, understood that trying to change the curriculum without addressing the more fundamental ideas that have shaped it would be like trying to cure a sick man simply by changing his diagnosis.

Bloom claimed that the West faces an intellectual crisis because no one any longer can make a principled defense of its institutions or way of life. This is most evident in the university, which has reformed itself according to the ideas of openness, tolerance, relativism, and diversity—all of which claim that no political principles, institutions, or way of life can be affirmed as being superior to any others.

This is the near-universal view among students and faculty at our leading institutions of higher learning. The tragedy here, according to Bloom, is that relativism has extinguished the real motive behind all education, which is “the search for the good life.” If all ideas and ideals are equal, there is little point in searching for the best ones.

One remembers the fury with which the book was attacked: which just made some of us recent college graduates all the more interested in what the fuss was about.

A retrospective like this, however, tells bits of the story that only the passage of time tends to send bubbling to the surface. For instance, did we know at the time that the book was written at the encouragement of Bloom's friend Saul Bellow? If so, it is lost in the mists of memory.

Certainly it was not common knowledge that the success of the book was almost certainly due to an unexpected change in editors between the time the book was accepted for publication and the time that editing actually began. The editor called for a snappier title (the original: Souls Without Longing,) and turned on its head the original academic structure that started with the ancients and moved to the modern. Instead, Bloom starts in medias res, with "his discussion of contemporary students, with his unsparing comments on their relationships, the books they read, and the music they like to hear..."

There, too, it is hard to remember that one of the hottest topics of debate about the book was actually Bloom's harsh indictment of rock music (an indictment that Roger Kimball, in his essay, takes up and expounds on in more general critical terms -- a fascinating discussion in and of itself.)

Or how about the fact that the book drew explicit parallels between the academy of the Nazi era and the radicalized academy of the 1960's and beyond?

Yet another thing that the perspective of two decades has yielded is that since this was practically the first book of its sort, the academy didn't see the book coming. As a result, the first major reviews were favorable. The NYT Book Review essay was by Roger Kimball (the contributor of one of the New Criterion essays,) and the editors of that publication helped things along by giving Kimball's review the title of "The Groves of Ignorance." Other favorable reviews quickly followed in the daily Times , the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

By the time anyone went on the counter-attack, it was too late, and the book had leaped to the best-seller list. The attacks on the book then only had the effect, as noted above, of attracting more attention from those who felt that things weren't quite right at America's major universities. Today, such a book would likely have been assigned unfavorable reviewers from the beginning at the major establishment organs. Overtly conservative books still tend to do quite well on the best-seller lists, but they tend to be "shock-jock" books of the Ann Coulter variety.

The end of the story isn't an entirely happy one for the lover of traditional education. While Bloom became a multi-millionaire and became an unlikely celebrity, and while generations of conservatives who followed would forever be emboldened in questioning liberal academic orthodoxies, Bloom's main goal went unfulfilled.

Bloom's primary concern was for the top few dozen universities in America, hoping that the course could be changed, and that there could be a return to liberal education (in the true sense) grounded in the classics and eternal verities. This most evidently did not happen.

But Bloom, of course, was looking at things from the only perspective he knew -- that of someone who had spent his entire academic life, from college student through professorship, in Ivy League level universities. As is often the case, it was probably difficult for him to conceive of the possibility that deep learning and thought can go on outside those elite institutions -- and indeed outside the university setting entirely.

Not surprisingly, one of the fruits of Bloom's work was a genuinely conservative one, in the modern sense where the importance of free enterprise and independence is emphasized. His book began a cascade of self-learning enterprises that ranges from home education of children to book clubs devoted to the great books of Western Civilization.

Who is to save, and pass on to the next generation, the classical learning of Western civilization? Look in the mirror.

War, military service, working class Republicans, and liberal intellectuals

No-one from Montana Headlines was able to attend the lecture by Stanley Hauerwas, a well-known theologian and pacifist, at Rocky Mountain College’s religion symposium.

The topic of his lecture according to the reports of its contents, however, is roughly that war gives a sense of purpose and other intangibles to a people that religion can and should replace with worship.

Reading about his comments, what came immediately to mind was an insightful article by the self-described anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber that was published in the January 2007 issue of Harper’s:
“Army of Altruists – on the alienated right to do good.” (Note: the article is neither available on-line at the Harper’s website nor is it any longer on newsstands. The link above is to a blog that discusses the article – if one happens to notice and read the fully reproduced text of the article while in the process of reading the blog comments, so be it.)

While Hauerwas concentrates on the “glorification of war,” Graeber takes on the specific issue of why so many young men and women willingly serve in the military. When one serves in the military, there is always the acute awareness that one can be sent to serve in a place of danger and be killed. Even today, when that awareness is more acutely felt than at any time since Vietnam, retention rates in all branches of the armed services are amazingly high.

He postulates (correctly, in our experience) that this isn’t nearly so much a result of attractive economic and educational opportunities that military service provides (an attractiveness that could, in the left’s thinking, be replaced by better civilian job availability and educational assistance) as it is the opportunity to pursue a career in something higher and nobler than merely making money. This is close to what Hauerwas is saying, but has a crucial distinction, since the draw and appeal that Graeber discusses is present in military service whether or not our country is in a state of war.

Graeber expands the discussion into the more general, and acutely relevant, subject of why so many working-class Americans reject the left and embrace the Republican party in America.

It is impossible to do Graeber’s lengthy article justice in a brief discussion, but the fact that it is written by an activist and academic who would by any standard be considered a member of the left’s “intellectual elite” makes it all the more remarkable. Conservatives from working class or rural backgrounds who find themselves in the presence of inquisitive liberals, especially in institutions of higher learning, are often asked why the overwhelmingly non-privileged “red America” votes Republican, “against our economic interests.” (This question is probably second in frequency only to various versions of the question: “you don’t seem so terribly stupid or uneducated – why do you vote Republican?”) One gets the feeling that one could have a conversation with Graeber without having those questions asked or implied.

We would disagree with some of Graeber's conclusions, and he has some odd conspiracy-theory angles in the article that give Republicans entirely too much credit for being capable of long-term political planning. Yet, Graeber does “get it” to a degree that Montana Headlines has perhaps never heard articulated by someone on the left. Perhaps Graeber’s experiences in studying relatively primitive Madagascar cultures as an anthropologist aids him in understanding how to approach strange foreign cultures such as one might find in “red America.” Even that is really probably not fair, since Graeber is nowhere condescending.

Here are some passages that gives a flavor of the article. Again, they are no substitute for the entirety of Graeber’s argument:

…progressives cannot even seem to understand the problem. After the last presidential election, the big debate in progressive circles was the relative importance of economic issues versus what was called “the culture wars.” Did the Democrats lose because they were not able to spell out any plausible economic alternatives, or did the Republicans win because they successfully mobilized evangelical Christians around the issue of gay marriage? The very fact that progressives frame the question this way not only shows they are trapped in the right’s terms of analysis; it demonstrates that they do not understand how America really works.

Let me illustrate what I mean by considering the strange popular appeal, at least until recently, of George W. Bush. In 2004 most of the American liberal intelligentsia did not seem to be able to get their minds around it. After the election, what left so many of them reeling was their suspicion that the things they most hated about Bush were exactly what so many Bush voters liked about him. Consider the debates, for example. If statistics are to be believed, millions of Americans watched George Bush and John Kerry lock horns, concluded that Kerry won, and then went off and voted for Bush anyway. It was hard to escape the suspicion that, in the end, Kerry’s articulate presentation, his skill with words and arguments, had actually counted against him.

This sent liberals into spirals of despair. They could not understand why decisive leadership was equated with acting like an idiot. Neither could they understand how a man who comes from one of the most elite families in the country, who attended Andover, Yale, and Harvard, and whose signature facial expression is a self-satisfied smirk, ever convinced anyone he was a “man of the people.” I must admit I have struggled with this as well. As a child of working-class parents who won a scholarship to Andover in the 1970s and, eventually, a job at Yale, I have spent much of my life in the presence of men like Bush, every inch of them oozing self-satisfied privilege. But, in fact, stories like mine–stories of dramatic class mobility through academic accomplishment–are increasingly unusual in America. (Emphasis ours)

Graeber goes on to postulate that what happened on the left was that the expansion of opportunity via education imploded during the late sixties and early seventies. It “hit a dead end” and radicalized campuses “were, predictably, exploding...”:

What followed could be seen as a kind of settlement. Campus radicals were reabsorbed into the university but set to work largely at training children of the elite. As the cost of education has skyrocketed, financial aid has been cut back, and the prospect of social mobility through education–above all liberal arts education–has been rapidly diminished. The number of working-class students in major universities, which steadily grew until the Seventies, has now been declining for decades.

The matter was further complicated by the fact that this overall decline of accessibility happened at almost exactly the same time that many who had previously been excluded (the G.I. Bill of Rights, after all, had applied basically to white males) were finally being welcomed. These were the identities celebrated in the campus “identity politics” of the Eighties and Nineties–an inclusiveness that notably did not extend to, say, Baptists or “rednecks.” Unsurprisingly, many focused their rage not on government or on university administrations but on minorities, queers, and feminists.

Graeber returns to a variation of the original question of why so many working class Americans vote Republican:

Why do working-class Bush voters tend to resent intellectuals more than they do the rich? It seems to me that the answer is simple. They can imagine a scenario in which they might become rich but cannot possibly imagine one in which they, or any of their children, would become members of the intelligentsia.

If you think about it, this is not an unreasonable assessment. A mechanic from Nebraska knows it is highly unlikely that his son or daughter will ever become an Enron executive. But it is possible. There is virtually no chance, however, that his child, no matter how talented, will ever become an international human-rights lawyer or a drama critic for the New York Times.


Graeber goes on to say that if this hypothetical daughter wants to do something higher and nobler, there are two choices: work for her church or join the military. There are actually a few more choices than that, but his point is a good one. He notes primarily financial factors and the institutionalized ways in which the children of academics/intellectuals are given privileges within elite academic institutions. He does not note (or perhaps notice) the role that traditional beliefs play as the children of "red America" negotiate any institution of higher learning, let alone an elite one -- beliefs generally disapproved of by most faculty and certainly rarely valued by them.

Difficulties experienced by bright but traditionally-minded students from relatively well-off families are significant enough. When one removes any financial advantages, a poor white Nebraska male with traditional Christian beliefs, no matter how bright or motivated, not only will be sorely disappointed if he dreams of being a drama critic for the New York Times -- he will likely never even review movies for the Omaha World-Herald.