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On Allan Bloom's 1987 best-seller about why students' disconnection from Great Books has led to relativism and ultimately nihilism.
What is the role of the university in our democracy? Bloom relates from his many years teaching the problem with kids today: They're subject to the evils that Tocqueville warned us go with American-style democracy: They're conformist, superficial, focused on the practical at the expense of the soul, and worst of all, the democratic ethos taken intellectually means that they're indiscriminate: Everyone's ideas are equally good. Bloom thinks that a liberal education should be the cure for this: by connecting with brilliant minds of the past, witnessing them speaking across history to each other, we become part of the great conversation about truth and virtue. People need to at one point in their lives seriously consider the question, "What is man?" in relation to our highest aspirations as opposed to our common, base needs. We need to forget, at least temporarily, about training for a particular job or any other practical consideration, and just engage in thinking for thinking's sake, which is the thing that Aristotle said makes us most human.
Bloom bemoans that incoming students for the most part no longer have favorite books, that their music is all instant gratification, and that they see truth as relative. While it is democracy itself that tends to support making people like this, ironically, this condition means that we're no longer fit to intelligently participate in politics. Bloom thinks that we need to understand intellectual history to understand the foundations of liberty and so be able to defend it. In overthrowing elites like the church and the noble class, we should become independent thinkers, but what happens much more often is that we just go along with the crowd, and the crowd's ethos in our case involves an ignorant scientism that disregards the needs of the soul, a leveling of values that precludes any serious discussion of the good, and the related idea that every opinion is equally valid.
Bloom includes Rawls and Mill in this condemnation. As you may recall, both of these thinkers were insistent that government shouldn't dictate the good to citizens (in Mill's case, this was a matter of not restricting speech), but Bloom is less concerned with the logical consequents of their philosophies than with the actual, social consequences, which in both cases Bloom diagnoses as nihilism: By denying values a central place in public norms, we promote mere legalism, pragmatism, i.e., a lack of values.
The full foursome is on board to reflect on how we feel about these critiques. Have our society and our educational system really produced a bunch of Nietzschean "last men"? Does Bloom's suggested program of Great Books (which is pretty much what Wes underwent at St. John's) actually produce better citizens?
Buy The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students
The image is by David Levine, drawn for the New York Review of Books' review of Bloom's book by Martha Nussbaum, which is pretty scathing and well worth your time. She focuses on the elitism involved in Bloom's account: He's really only worried about the quality of education of his elite students, and recommends a regimen that will surely be out of reach of most people who actually have to worry about making a living.
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I agree with Bloom on the importance of the liberal arts education. But I can’t help but feel that in complaining about his students, he is missing the development that is going on. The students who came to university with favourite books and composers were, I suspect, upper or upper-middle class children, whose parents themselves had gone to university and could introduce them to these works, and who also had leisure time enough to engage with these things. The growth in the accessibility of the university in the 20th century means you get more students who (typically) did not grow up in homes with classical books and classical music, or who simply could not afford to spend much free time reading. If you are a supporter of the liberal arts education, this has to be a cause for celebration, because it means the type of profound self-reflection Bloom advocates is not just limited to a small elite.
Maybe Bloom deals with this more in his book. I cannot help but feel, however, that it ties back to his valorization of Socrates and the Republic as an educational model. The dialectical education Socrates gives to young men like Lysis is, of course, unparalleled in terms of broadening the mind. But you can’t personally debate all of Athens. This kind of education is only possible because it is so narrow, because it excludes women, slaves, poor people: everybody who is not a handsome young aristocratic boy. I think Bloom forgets this, and so overlooks the fact that the decline in the enthusiasm of the students is not a decline, but a consequence of the democratization of the university.
‘See, the idea that people could be free is extremely frightening to anybody with power.
That’s why the 1960s have such a bad reputation. I mean, there’s a big literature about the Sixties, and it’s mostly written by intellectuals, because they’re the people who write books, so naturally it has a very bad name-because they hated it. You could see it in the faculty clubs at the time: people were just traumatized by the idea that students were suddenly asking questions and not just copying things down. In fact, when people like Allan Bloom [author of The Closing of the American Mind] write as if the foundations of civilization were collapsing in the Sixties, from their point of view that’s exactly right: they were. Because the foundations of civilization are, “I’m a big professor, and I tell you what to say, and what to think, and you write it down in your notebooks, and you repeat it.” If you get up and say, “I don’t understand why I should read Plato, I think it’s nonsense,” that’s destroying the foundations of civilization. But maybe it’s a perfectly sensible question – plenty of philosophers have said it, so why isn’t it a sensible question?
As with any mass popular movement, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on in the Sixties-but that’s the only thing that makes it into history: the crazy stuff around the periphery. The main things that were going on are out of history-and that’s because they had a kind of libertarian character, and there is nothing more frightening to people with power.’ – Noam Chomsky
Utility and Luxury
I’m sympathetic with sentiments expressed in this episode, by Wes and Seth, about the socializing and civilizing effects of a core tertiary curriculum (Great Books or otherwise), but hold similar suspicions as others that it is just a tad too elitist for the American mode. What’s more, it betrays the considerable amount of investment (privilege, if you prefer) required to bring one to an adequate, prerequisite level before stepping into such a venerable program.
It’s a luxury good, in other words, and perhaps the biggest luxury one can buy in college education, for the practical cash-out value being (1) empirically hard to measure, and (2) arguably modest when compared to our highly-refined taxonomy of American university-degree specialization.
That very deliberate specialization (e.g. business degrees, law degrees, medical degrees, and so on) is a critical component of the dynamism of our remarkable economy, and the envy of the world round. It’s based on the same classic-liberal utility theory that the PEL crew have taken on in other episodes (e.g. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Friedrich Hayek) and her secret sauce is ‘the multiplier effect.’ That multiplier effect, in turn, is what accounts for our nation’s amazing wealth and surplus of leisure (residual economic-inequality notwithstanding). And that surplus of wealth and leisure, by our PEL hosts’ own explicit admission, are constituent parts to leading a self-reflective, examined life.
So this leads me to the conclusion that we have cooked something here like aporia? That is, contained within the normative aspiration for a tradition-cohesive, educated populace is this contradiction: In order to build your better Republic, one must abjure the canonical curriculum and let her citizens find as much on their own terms.
I’m disappointed that there was no mention of Robert Paul Wolff’s classic review of Bloom’s book as a piece of Saul Bellow fiction, in the journal Academe.