The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom

2017-02-19T12:58:00.000-06:00

The Closing of the American Mind

by Allan Bloom

How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students

Allan Bloom was a Philosophy Professor at Cornell University in the Sixties during the Student Uprisings. This book was published in 1987 by Simon and Schuster while Bloom was a professor of social thought at the University of Chicago. It's most often noted for it's commentary on higher education and Part I is titled "Students" while Part III is titled "Universities", however, he does include a part titled "Nihilism, American Style".

If you are uncomfortable reading philosophy, then this book is not for you. Nietzsche, Marx and Plato, among other philosophers are discussed. Alan Bloom wrote the book because he believed that, just as the subtitle suggests, the trends at universities were failing democracy and doing an injustice to the souls of America's college students.

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In his Introduction, Bloom said that even then, in the 80's "almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative" and that they are shocked to hear anyone suggest that Truth is an Absolute. And presciently, he noted that, "The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to open-ness and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating....The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think you are right at all."

In this you can hear the echoes of today's left-leaning students. They no longer see American Exceptionalism as once was the norm, but now believe America is no better than any other nation. The students are left without any moral guidance except, as noted, that open-ness to everything is the only virtue. We are in the chaotic wake of this influence now, with left-leaning individuals who are open to everything without regard to whether it is healthy, unhealthy, right or wrong. This probably explains why they both extol women's rights and yet make accusations of 'racism' whenever anyone who is not a relativist speaks a word against radical Islam.

Bloom, again in the Introduction, explains that the civic education these students received "turned away from concentrating on the Founding to concentrating on openness based on history and social science. There was even a general tendency to debunk the Founding, to prove the beginnings were flawed in order to license a greater openness to the new." So we see, the attacks on our countries Foundation has been percolating for a long time and as they say, the "chickens have come home to roost". The disdain for America's founding fathers (they are "charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests"), the treatment of the Constitution as a "living document', the assault on our national borders are all results of what we have allowed to be taught in our schools.

Although his subtitle mentions how universities are failing Democracies, he doesn't address what this might lead to for America. Bloom died in 1992. It would have been fascinating to see what he thought about the left-leaning protesters on campuses today.

Parts are fascinating, parts are too deeply philosophical for my mind but some parts do provide insight in how we got to this left-leaning radical intolerance with which we must now somehow grapple. Since this started in the schools, then it is to the schools we must look to save American Exceptionalism, democracy and even the Union.

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The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom