Closing Time

As some have noted, it's the 25th anniversary of one of the most unlikely bestsellers ever, Allan Bloom's The Closing Of The American Mind.  The book was a jeremiad against higher education, which professor Bloom claimed had failed democracy and impoverished students souls.

The book received great early reviews. Later, though, there was pushback--for two reasons, I think.  First, critics started to realize (or at least believe) the book was conservative. (Not that Bloom was a conservative, though many thought he was.) Second, a little-known academic, one of their own, became a rich celebrity, and that was too much to take.  So Bloom spent his last years enjoying his money and fame while being on the outs with the academic world.  If Bloom had one thing going for him, at least he tended to make more sense than his enemies.

I read the book years ago, so it's hard to go into much detail, but I wasn't that impressed.  It seemed the lengthy (and widely unread) portion of the book discussing major philosophical figures, while it had some points to make, featured a specialized, even pinched view of great ideas and their effects on the world today.  It's one thing to question the value of deconstuctionism, it's quite another to be threatened by the Enlightenment.

As to his much better-known look at contemporary culture, once again, some reasonable points were drowned out by too much cranky "get off my lawn" rhetoric.  The idea that minds that had once been open were now closed wasn't analysis, it was nostalgia.  Yes, there were cultural threats to deal with at the time, but there are always threats, and those of the 1980s weren't especially worse than in other eras.  Furthermore, Bloom seemed to have trouble distinguishing real threats from simple cultural fads--or even positive trends.  In any case, though we didn't change the way Bloom wanted, many of the cultural problems of that time have lessened in the intervening years.

Part of Bloom's answer was elitism of a type that goes back to Plato.  Once again, in small doses, not a bad idea--let the cream rise to the top, and spend their days discussing higher ideas in the groves of academe.  Let them publish and have their ideas filter into the wider world.  But that's only a small part of a system that's greater than philosophers, not run by it.  Furthermore, one of these ideas is relativism, and it's the job of the modern philosopher to deal with it, not slay it.