Ep. 192: “The Closing of the American Mind”: Allan Bloom on Education (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: So do you want to move more specifically to his issues with the university? What's wrong with its organization, how it's lost its sense of mission? He gives a whole history of the university throughout the ages and the different ways that it related to the outside world. So what is wrong with the University today in 1987?

0:23 Seth: Well, as higher education became more available, there was a greater demand for secondary education, and so there were more schools, more enrollments, and consequently a shift away from the mission of the university that he wanted to see, which is about liberal education, to more of specialization and technical or professional education. And so in a sense, the universities kind of lost their way. That's kind of something that was happening in the society. But structurally, he talks about the breakdown into basically the three areas, the natural science, the social science, and the humanities.

And that in a university with a focus on traditional liberal education, at least with respect to natural science and humanities, there's a very clear understanding about what the role of those is. But universities have lost that balance, and that while the natural sciences are fine doing what they do, there's this mistaken notion that the social sciences can provide something that the humanities are supposed to provide, and that because that perception's there, because the perception that what the humanities provide, namely this ability to do an inquiry into yourself and your role as a citizen in a society and so forth, that there's a questioning about what the point of the humanities actually is.

So there's been this sort of slow withering away, and instead of stepping up to the challenge and vigorously advocating for themselves, humanities departments have spun off into their own little worlds or tried to emulate the natural sciences and essentially have made themselves irrelevant.

2:06 Mark: So what do we think of this?

2:08 Dylan: Part of it is a criticism of the university as, again, being not really an education, even as an institution, as being a kind of heap and a training a la carte. And that extends both to the intellectual organization of the university as well as the academic activities of it. I couldn't completely separate out how much of it is born out of his concern for education of the students, that somehow the structure of the university is bad for the students themselves versus it being, in important ways, intellectually. I won't call it intellectually bankrupt, but intellectually marginalized and contracted.

I mean, that seems to be one of his most fundamental complaints, is that the intellectual life of the students and the intellectual life of the university is one that is not guided by at least a general devotion to the most important questions in human life, and that it's guided by other things. And in the case of natural sciences, he would point out that, well, natural sciences have this advantage, that they are basically considered pretty darn useful. And the professors in the natural sciences, a lot of times they really like aspects of the humanities and stuff like that.

But in large part that's because they think they're fun and interesting and they can just pick the students they want to have for themselves, but that they don't consider themselves as engaging in the activity of the university with, you know, across disciplines, for instance. So I don't know which of those problems he's most concerned with. I guess he's probably concerned with Both of them.

3:59 Wes: Right.

4:00 Mark: So I would think initially, like we should just have better guidance counselors. That's what he would propose. So that if you are putting together, I mean, surely different students have different interests and so they should take different things. And you can require. A lot of schools do now, you know, you have to take some sort of. You can't just take chemistry if you're a chemistry guy will require that you take something out of the humanities. And maybe with a good guidance counselor, they could have you pick something from the humanities that's in some way relevant.

You know, so if you are a chemist, then you're getting something at like the philosophical foundations of science that, you know, something that'll be generally applicable. Or talk about the relationship between science and the soul. You know, just there's, there's a lot of literature that's sort of relevant. But I think he thinks that even that kind of thing would not solve the question. Because the professors in the various disciplines, you know, it's just a matter of intellectual history, the way things have shaken out, that they, their disciplines do not speak to each other.

You cannot make them relevant. You cannot. At least that seems to be his claim. Whereas I feel like, yeah, okay, you could have. If students are dumb or not well guided, then they can take an incoherent load of crap. And I think he thinks like, okay, fine, you require that the computer science guy take one humanities course. They're going to take the easiest possible thing. It's going to have no effect on them. Like, yeah, okay, that does happen. But so, yeah, it's up to the student. The student can synthesize these things and kind of make them talk to each other.

It's not really. Who cares if the math teacher even has respect for the humanities? You can take both and as a individual, provided you have somehow. Maybe this is what he would say, that the problem is having individuals that have these resources, but that the individual should have the resources to be able to make the connections him or herself.

5:59 Dylan: One of his responses is surely going to be, why would you expect an 18 year old to know how to make their own education for themselves? How could you possibly expect them to be able to do that? Maybe that's your good guidance counselor, you know, that within the realm of possible choice that there's ways of formulating the problem of their education, that students ought to be able to be making some choices about it. But certainly one of the problems is just too much choice and a kind of kowtowing to choice.

6:31 Wes: Right?

6:32 Mark: I guess I just Want to say serendipity because I always find, you know, it's not a matter of Jungian synchronicity in the universe. It's a matter that when you're studying one thing and then you turn to another thing. Well, there are a number of relationships it could have. It could be like, wow, it's so nice to have a break from calculus and study music history. And there really is no connection between them. But by studying both of them, you're becoming a more well rounded person. That's a fine relation. No relation is a good relationship. They're picking at different parts of your soul. They don't have to talk to each other. But just as often you will find that, you know, something comes up in your political theory course or whatever, and like, oh, this something comparable, you'll draw connections yourself to what you're then reading in your classics course or whatever.

7:21 Dylan: The thing is, yeah, I think you're right, Mark. So this is something that I myself got that kind of liberal education where I had to put things together on my own. And there were some people who knew about my project, but it wasn't a community activity. It is a remarkably powerful thing, like what Seth was referring to at the beginning, even just having one class where there is a group of people that you are engaging in something in intellectual activity consistently over an extended period of time in which the conversations and the books are held together as a whole.

That, I have to say, is one of the most remarkable things about the all required curriculum at St. John's is the way in which for four years those conversations extend and those connections you're talking about resonate across the whole curriculum, across the whole student body. And I don't want to say that that's the only thing. Right. But that is a remarkable advantage of that kind of engagement. It's actually not that different than, you know, I don't want to trivialize, but being on a training team where all of you are in it together, you're all doing the same thing, you're all sharing the same experience and you are all engaged in those questions.

And so it ends up heightening that kind of connectivity because you have conversations with people who know what you're talking about.

8:56 Mark: Wes, you were super down on UT when we started as compared to St. John's is this. Do you still resonate with your feelings at the time that this part of the book is channeling those thoughts that you were concerned that the UT undergrads were not getting the kind of guided, coherent education that you had Gotten.

9:16 Wes: I don't know, I'm so conflicted on this stuff now. Maybe I'm so cynical now about education, the educational system.

9:24 Mark: He has seemed to argue here that it's not a merely status based racket as the way you have sometimes described it recently, that no, it actually teaches you to think. And the only reason you might think it's a status based racket is well, because either you're looking at curriculums that he would also condemn or because you already have achieved the requisite self reflective capacity that you think that maybe it's not necessary to pay thousands and thousands of dollars to get that for young people today.

9:53 Wes: Wait, say the last part again.

9:55 Mark: In other words, it's the who says we don't need no education? Like it's the over educated guy in Pink Floyd.

10:02 Wes: I mean I think one of the things we should keep in mind is we're talking here about the education of an elite. And I think Bloom explicitly says that at some point we're not talking about an education that everyone's going to get or that he even thinks everyone ought to get. I mean you have to be prepared. My experience at UT was the students aren't prepared to write and read philosophy. They have no background in this. So why, why are we trying to teach them? Why are we doing philosophy courses for people who aren't even prepared to engage? It's like say let's have a literature course with people who can't read.

10:40 Dylan: Basically you're talking about being a TA for a class and teaching undergraduates at ut.

10:46 Wes: Yeah, it's really depressing. So just back to the whole this is the education of elites. I'm going to sound so cynical now. I'm just not sure it really does matter how we educate our elites at this point. I think they're going to go on to their investment banking and similar careers

11:05 Dylan: anyway and it won't matter what the state of their soul is.

11:08 Wes: No, I think a lot of this is overblown. I think it's a quasi. You know, I believed all this stuff and I want to believe it, but I think for most people, whether or not they're leading a good life, like a truly good life, is not as tied to whether or not they're reading great books as I once thought it was. As I once very, very self interestedly and conveniently. Oh man, I have the secret and everyone else is. I think it is good. Ideally everyone would get this sort of education. I think.

11:48 Dylan: Really? I just thought that you just said that you don't think that's true, yeah.

11:52 Wes: It would be the kind of thing that there'd have to be a foundation for it in elementary school and high school, and I think high school would be the place to do some of this great book stuff.

12:01 Dylan: But let's ask a sort of more fundamental question about this notion of liberal education. So for Bloom, what's central to it is cultivating the capability of people. And let's put aside whether it's elites or not for a second. Cultivating the capability of people to. To live the good life and to do it knowingly and well. And part of that has to do with their citizenship, their participation in a liberal democracy. Part of that has to do with them just becoming flourishing human beings. And central to that, for Bloom, is reading books. Absolutely fundamentally central to it.

And not just any books, but books that one can glean information through thousands of years about the controversies in the ways of thinking about how to live life well, and great disagreements about that. One might say that that's just a bunch of hooey. Right. That, for instance, you might say, yeah, you have a soul to cultivate, but you don't need to read books to do it. Right. That would be one response. That reading books is a way to do it. Maybe. Maybe some people just disagree with that too. Or you might also disagree with the idea that education at a university has that responsibility at all.

That that is what it is supposed to properly be doing, is helping cultivate the souls of young people so that they can live life well, you might say, well, no, actually, what it's supposed to be doing is preparing people with the skills and the knowledge in order to participate fully in their lives in the economy, and that the flourishing of their souls will work itself out. And that's not the responsibility of the university.

13:41 Wes: So as far as leading a good life and being happy, they might be two different things. Yeah, I don't know. I think they're related, but it's. You know, I just think there's no guarantee that that's gonna have anything to do with your level of happiness or that it's even required. I guess I'm not gonna make much sense in this because I'm so conflicted. I do think there's a relationship between education and the preservation of a democracy and public discourse. But I guess I've gotten so pessimistic. I just think the technological circumstances that, like the existence of Twitter and smartphones and the psychological effects all this is having, and the level of vitriol, that now people are ready to direct at each other on a moment's notice.

And the. I think the sort of uptick in narcissism. I guess I'm just a pessimist about the role of educational institutions in doing anything about that. And I think those forces are so much greater and so much more important.

14:41 Dylan: It's interesting that you think that education isn't an antidote to that, whether it be liberal education or not.

14:47 Wes: It's not that it couldn't be. I'm not sure on a societal level, for practical purposes, whether it really does anything at this point.

14:56 Dylan: I mean, I think one of Bloom's observations would be that one of the reasons for that is the lack of a shared culture. We haven't talked much about that. We talked a little bit about the idea that a liberal education, at least his great book's idea of liberal education, was a. Intended to connect people to their own history of their shared community, but also it was intended to provide a wholeness to the cultural experience.

15:23 Mark: Yeah. So this is a good aspect of the book that we hadn't touched yet that really connects with a lot of things we've talked about before, is that he wants there to be a real sense of the common good. And he thinks that some of the foundational elements making up American democracy vitiate against that. And these are things. So Wes has written on this before. He brings up Rawls in particular, and he actually brings up Mill. We, in our free speech discussion were distinguishing between merely not wanting government to interfere in favoring one kind of speech over another, or restricting speech that, you know, instrumentally is a foolish way.

You're not actually going to stamp out bad ideas by outlawing them, but at the same time acknowledging that culturally, of course, there are ideas that we want to favor and some that we want to squash that are not serious contenders in intellectual debate. Flat earthers and various kinds of racists and things that these are not really things that we would want to give the time of day, and that having different takes on what we want the government to stay out of and what we still want to encourage or discourage, that those are compatible. But looking at it from a cultural perspective, he says the effect of free speech, and he says this actually degrades to free expression, a term that he doesn't like.

Not the logical consequent, but the actual consequent in people's behavior or in the dialectic of history, let's say the dialect of intellectual history, is that no more do we admit that some ideas are simply better than others. In the same way that if we say the government has to just be absolutely neutral, as Rawls picture of liberalism says, with regard to the good. So this is again, the Rawls versus Sandel conflict that we've talked about in quite some depth before. That actually that leads to, on a social level, us just having no shared culture.

And likewise, we have to at least have as part of our shared culture. He says, like the founding Fathers were not about being tolerant of intolerance. They were not like these free speech extremists. They thought that our society was founded with a sense, the liberal sense of the good built in. And so that's like part of our directedness as a society. That's part of essentially our elitism, that we're saying that this notion of the good, that democracy is objectively better. It's not just our opinion. It's not just an accident of history. So this gets at why he thinks the Western tradition is special, why he thinks that we should not just make our point of view one among many and totally relativize everything that that is ultimately self undermining.

And the fact that he put Rawls and Mill on the bad side, on the identity politics side, on the relativism and ultimately nihilism side is interesting.

18:16 Wes: Yeah. I don't think he's read Rawls among the many things that that could be just the solution.

18:23 Mark: And he doesn't say enough about it in detail that you could actually tell. Yeah, like, that's a big flaw of this book. You just want to have him in the room and ask him, why is this your take on Mill? Let's talk about Mill for a second. Let's get the quotes out. Let's be thorough in the way that you would like and make Mill speak with the views that you're putting in contrast with that. And I think, yeah, the program he's outlining is good, but he's not showing it here.

18:48 Wes: He says John Rawls is almost a parody of this tendency, writing hundreds of pages to persuade men and proposing a scheme of government that would force them not to despise anyone. What? You can't despise anyone under liberal democracy.

19:03 Mark: We'll read the quote that's attributed to Rawls, which I assume is from Theory of Justice, but I did not remember that.

19:09 Wes: Where is the quote?

19:10 Mark: It's the next sentence. Not to despise anyone. In A Theory of justice, he writes that the physicist or the poet should not look down on the man who spends his life counting blades of grass or performing any other frivolous or Corrupt activity. Indeed, he should be esteemed since esteem from others, as opposed to self esteem, is a basic need of all men. So indiscriminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is discrimination. In other words, the government is not allowed to say this is good activity. That's bad activity. The government is not setting here is the good is letting people figure that out for themselves. It is remaining neutral. Even if some people are doing things that according to Bloom, are just objectively

19:47 Dylan: obnoxious, it does seem to conflate the difference between the government doing that, making that judgment and individual people doing that. Bloom seems to be reading it as people aren't allowed to despise other people.

20:01 Mark: Yeah, and I think that has been the issue, that the way that west was responding to Sandel following Rawls against this point was to say, of course you can have as a cultural thing a thick conception of the good. It's just you're not putting that in legislation. You're not putting that in the foundations of society that you have to favor.

20:21 Dylan: No, those are two different things. Right. You wouldn't put it in legislation, but it might be part of your culture. Right, the thick foundations of society.

20:28 Wes: Yeah, that's true. There could be a dominant. You'd still be a pluralistic society that tolerates different thick conceptions of the good. But that is, you're right not to say that one might not be predominant culturally.

20:38 Dylan: And also that, I mean, your beef with Sandel, I thought, had a lot to do with the possibility or impossibility of having that be part of our legislation and the structure of our laws.

20:50 Wes: Just on the Rawls thing here with the blades of grass, I don't remember what he says about that specifically. So I might be being unfair to Bloom on this count on that specific example. But regardless, I think the broader idea is that somehow we can't have a thick conception of the good if we're fundamentally pluralistic. I don't buy that. Yeah, so I think the, you know, in a lot of places, I just have the feeling that he has very broad brush familiarity with some writers. Some of them, obviously he's read over and over again. You know, he's read his Plato and Rousseau and I'm sure he's read some Nietzsche.

I just, you know, I think for all his sort of elitism about the desire for depth, at least here there's not always an indication like what he says about Freud. And this is so typical. All right, sorry, I'm going to have to do my little soapbox for one Second, he accuses Freud of being reductive in the sense of doing away with the noble and the good. And this idea that if we could just all be sexually unrepressed, that's superior to the other solutions, including civilization and culture. All right, he's read Civilization and Its Discontents like every other humanities professor, but I do not see any evidence that he's read deeply in Freud because that is simply not the case.

That's a caricature of Freud. Freud explicitly rails against the idea that, hey, man, we just need to be less repressed and more sexually expressive. No, that is not the solution for Freud. The arts and sublimation work and genuine relationships, love and all the higher stuff, that is the solution. I see this in other writers as well. For instance, Marilynne Robinson, who I happen to like a lot. She's an essayist and novelist who I admire a great deal. But it's the same sort of thing. These people with conservative tendencies, I just think they have it in their mind that Freud is a certain way.

And I do not think they've explored very deeply because he's not as inconsistent with their views as they think. And I think in many ways he's a true extension of the sort of Socratic pursuit of self examination. I know you guys knew that I would do this, and it's not just Freud, but it's here and there where I think, yeah, you're not really living up to this idea of a deep, deep examination of Freud. And I can say that, yeah, because I've spent so much time so carefully reading him. And it's pretty obvious when someone just has a passing familiarity with Civilization and Its Discontents, it leads to the same silly characterization.

23:24 Mark: So maybe a contrast would be with Eva Brann, who, you know, we read her book on Will that also deals with a lot of authors. It deals with sort of overall the role of will in society and the intellectual history of the term, but was just so much more deliberate when talking about any given author about Will that you really got a vivid picture. There were fewer of them in here. Bloom kind of covers everything that he can come up with. It's just the book is so. Even though it's so many pages, his scope is kind of wider than a reasonable book should have.

23:58 Wes: I think the synoptic style can be great to kind of pull together a big argument. Although if you are going to go at people, Marx and Freud, and by the way, it's Freud's birthday today and it was Marx's birthday yesterday, so shout out to both, even Though they're Bloom's villains. You know, if you're going to go at people, the onus is on you to provide more detail. Unfortunately, a book like this where you just get these little snarky, offhanded, where the authors basically just become these broad representatives of certain trends and points of view that you have a negative feeling about.

You know, if you associate Freud and Nietzsche with the phrase lifestyle and it just really bothers you every time you hear that or the word values, and you're in a dangerous situation at that point. First you have a whole set of cultural irritations that are based in the contemporary, and then you're hooking them up to writers with enormous nuanced bodies of work. And you're setting yourself up to, I think, make some unfortunate generalizations and associations that just aren't borne out by careful scholarship. And of course he's not going to even address the scholarship that would disagree with him.

And that's not the place for a book like this.

25:12 Mark: But so is that because this is fundamentally a book of intellectual history. So even though he talks about the great geniuses being in dialogue with each other as a matter of influence, and if we're trying to give a genealogy of our current morals, then we need to look at, you know, so he just. Here's a doctrine of Nietzsche. Here's the way Freud went with it, here's the way Weber went with it. And those guys in turn had an effect on a whole bunch of writers, lesser writers, and just tracing the intellectual, maybe the degradation of that path. Like it's hard to tell when he's describing Nietzsche how much he actually admires Nietzsche. It seems like he does think Nietzsche is a great genius. But it's.

25:58 Wes: Yeah, he does. He explicitly says it.

25:59 Mark: Yeah, okay, okay. But I think he's still, you know, in some way holding Nietzsche responsible. Like I said earlier, ironically, that his ideas have led to the exact thing that he feared. But it's not necessarily just that, you know, Freud is the villain in this. It's just that's the way the history has gone. And drawing the connections is not necessarily to impute intellectual laziness. Or maybe it's not Freud himself, maybe it's the way that Freud became popular, which naturally is a very dumbed down way. Like that's the way anything becomes popular.

26:34 Dylan: Well, I mean, part of his criticism, right. Is Nietzsche's undemocratic tendencies. Right. I think Bloom, even though he comes across as a fair bit of an aristocrat, seems in the end a defender of liberal Democracy, Yes.

26:47 Mark: Once you go beyond good and evil, once you're being extreme, there's no guarantee that you're going to come out. When I say you're, I'm just talking about really the plurality of people. And again, we just had the discussion on Mother where one of the things was that the fundamental chaos of the plurality of society, that there's a plurality of writers and thinkers. And even if Walter Kaufmann is being really careful to get Nietzsche right, every possible way you could get Nietzsche wrong is also going to be out there somewhere. So it's just there's always a fundamental chaos in this place. Plurality of writers. That's just the way intellectual history works. It's a very different model than Hobbes and Aristotle communicating as if they were contemporaries over the years. It's like there's these two fundamental different relationships between thinkers going on at the same time.

27:35 Dylan: Well, I was thinking that for Bloom, the danger implied by the anti democratic tendencies of someone like Nietzsche and the strength in the culture to preserve liberal democracy in the face of those is the fact that for Bloom, society, especially liberal democracy, is really sort of deeply fragile and constantly endangered, even by itself.

28:00 Mark: Yeah. Like as Tocqueville said. Yeah.

28:03 Dylan: Because it doesn't defend itself very well in a way that something like natural science doesn't defend itself very well on its own terms. Right. In the sense of like, why is natural science good? It's always a utility argument or something. Something like that, typically. But he's got World War II shortly on his heels in his own life and I think that he finds Hobbes paranoia about the dangers of not having good rule and the fragility of society and the tendency for things to just descend into chaos as being very real. And just looking around whenever I read the news, I wonder a bit about that myself because of where I live. There are lots of places I could live that simply would be sort of politically deeply untenable as far as I'm concerned. But most people in the world live in those conditions. Yeah.

28:55 Wes: I mean, is it education that keeps us from being say a Syria at some point or is it something else?

29:03 Dylan: Yeah, I think he believes that because he believes that Socrates tried to save Alcibiades. This is where your comment about the elites, I think comes up. It's the education of the elites that will allow them to rule.

29:15 Wes: Well, but then there's the citizenship aspect and. Yeah, I just don't know. I don't know.

29:21 Dylan: Well, that's where I myself don't like this aspect of liberal education. As being the education of the elites. Which is exactly what he says.

29:29 Unknown speaker: Right.

29:30 Dylan: Like, the very first lines of the book are like that. And I myself find that notion of liberal education problematic, at least to me. It's all part of the kind of democratic enabling of a person and their flourishing. But maybe that has more to do with just education in general.

29:51 Wes: Yeah, I mean, obviously, I'm just thinking more generally now, not just about elites, but the educational system in the United States, where there's this requirement now that has been for a long time, that every child is educated and there's public education provided and all that, and everyone at least has a certain minimum. I mean, obviously there's a humanizing effect to that, and that's important. Ideally, everyone would get a great education and one which teaches them to be free. And that's the liberal arts sense of free. Free thinking and not simply just a conformist and not someone who would, because they're conformist, would contribute to the sorts of evils to which societies are susceptible, including mass discrimination and violence, for instance.

But I honestly, the, you know, this whole, like, more idealized version of education, I don't know. I don't know if that's because, you know, Germany had a great higher culture shortly before devolving into, you know, I. I just don't know.

30:56 Dylan: You don't know that the antidote.

30:59 Wes: Yeah, yeah. That having a solid culture and having a really great liberal arts education, whether it's for the elites or maybe for as many people as possible, whether ultimately that is the key thing. People are so susceptible to their passions and cultural influences. I know a lot of people, as I see people get older on Facebook, people. I went to St. John's with the not models of reason and just cantankerous. And I feel it in myself as well, and I'm trying to resist it, but just becoming one of these people who is just reflexively cantankerous about one political issue or another, like, oh, my God, we are getting old.

31:44 Dylan: You know, that's funny you say it that way, because there's something of that in Bloom's book too, that kind of cantankerousness about the past.

31:53 Mark: So I feel like, of course, some sort of liberal education, as opposed to purely training for the job that you are going to have, is a essential thing for being an enlightened human being, insofar as that term makes sense. But to insist that it be done in this way seems pretty ridiculous to me. And based on just his own experience that the excitement I see in the eyes of students when they finally come into contact with a genius and they're shown this whole different world, and I've been called a travel agent instead of a professor because it's like I'm taking them to another land.

And, like, I believe that's an authentic experience that he's had. But then generalizing from that to, that's the best way that everybody should learn. And it entails that everybody has to read freaking Aristotle. Specifically. Say, I just think of, you know, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when Pirsig talks about being forced to read the Poetics in school and just absolutely not having that meeting of the minds.

33:00 Dylan: Pirsig might have been at Chicago at the same time as Bloom was.

33:04 Wes: Actually, no, I. I would defend him on this. I think in a Western society, everyone should have read Aristotle. I know that sounds weird for me to say after all the things I just said, but. Yeah, and everyone should know some Latin and Ancient Greek and.

33:19 Mark: Oh, geez, really?

33:21 Wes: Yeah, yeah. You don't become Shakespeare without some Latin.

33:26 Mark: So when you were ranting at UT about how much better the model of St. John's was at UT, I just thought that that was absolutely absurd. I've mellowed on this over time. I took a lot of courses. I took as many courses I could fit in. I took way more than I needed to graduate. I pursued the things that I was fricking interested in. And if I had been forced to spend time learning Ancient Greek instead of actually doing stuff that I wanted to do, I would have been pissed off. That would not have been a good use of my time. I think people, there are plenty of

34:01 Wes: ways you might have been pleasantly surprised, like you had just been given tickets by a travel agent to a land you could not have imagined that you would.

34:12 Mark: On the other hand, I was also amazed, and not necessarily in a good way. I was dumbfounded, let's say, about your ability to take Kant seriously as not just a historical relic, but as somebody who, like, might well have been. Right. That blew my mind when actually talking to you about that. Like, no, no. Hegel was after Kant and Husserl and those guys and Sartre. They were after Kant, and they were progress. And so I very much had this. This is why I'm not sure that the historical method is altogether essential. Right. We are saying, like Mill says, if you just take the concepts like equality and liberty handed to you by society, taken for granted, then you don't really understand them.

But in order to understand them, do you have to read Locke and do a Genealogy of it? Or can you just argue against people right now on the other side of the world, or not that far, who do not agree with you, do not agree that women are men's equals, do not agree that everybody is fundamentally equal, and really do believe in elites? Or do we really, to understand reason, have to go back, you know, read the historical sources for why we have the concept of reason that we did? Or is it not enough just to argue against religious people who explicitly reject your narrow conception of reason like it seems, even ignoring the historical stuff, you can still be agitated to have to defend current concepts and thereby, according to Mill's logic, gain some understanding and appreciation of them?

35:50 Wes: I don't know how articulately I can defend it, but I think the history, knowing the history is important. And like I said before, retracing that whole conversation that's happened, you can't get to the same level of depth, I think, by simply starting from scratch.

36:07 Dylan: I mean, part of it is that you talk about the thinking that you learn to do, but a lot of it is that you are learning from people who are very, very good at thinking. And you're not necessarily formulating yourself. Right? You're reading Kant and trying to understand Kant. You're not presented with the first question in Kant's book and trying to write the Critique of Pure Reason yourself. Those are two completely different activities.

36:33 Wes: Well, I actually spent a long time studying the Critique of Pure Reason at St. John's but what I would do is I would read a paragraph and I would spend a lot of time thinking about it and also thinking about what might come after that paragraph. So, like I said, working forward in advance, that was the only way I could feel like I had any strong grasp, because it was baffling to me in the beginning, but I knew there was something there that was important. So I don't know, maybe. Am I missing your point?

37:05 Dylan: No. I took part of Mark's point, his second point that we were just responding to, that you could read anybody and engage with anybody on these questions and be prodded to formulate your own opinion about them and take somebody from another culture or another part of the world who has ideas completely at odds with you, and you could engage with them and be prodded into your own activity to respond to them and formulate your own thoughts. And that was meant to undermine the idea that you should be reading any particular books at all or historical books at all.

37:43 Seth: So, I mean, I think Bloom would respond. First of all, we'll go back to the point of engaging with the tradition and the culture that you're in. So yeah, you could have an argument with an Indonesian Buddhist about some topic, but is it going to inform you in the same way that having that conversation, so to speak with somebody or some thinker or some text from your tradition? He would probably argue no. The second thing is, I think Bloom would say the whole reason to engage with tradition is there are no thinkers like Aristotle right now. There are no Hobbes.

They all lived before liberal democracy. They made liberal democracy possible. But in liberal democracy the conditions are not there for people like that to. Or at least they're much harder to find. Or maybe they're, if they can be found, they're in university. So you go to a university and you study with somebody who's connected to the tradition because they're the ones who get it, but you're not just going to go out to a Starbucks and have a conversation about it. So I think that's partially how he'd respond. But I want to get back to what Mark was talking about.

You know, if he'd had to read the great books instead of taking the classes that he wanted to take. One of the things that Bloom says in the book about the educational, the curriculum is right, some professional things like a business or pre med or pre law or business or whatever, they don't give you the flexibility. There's not enough time for you to take any other courses. So if you do even have the opportunity, opportunity to take any electives or they just, there's just one, you're not going to get the exposure that you wanted. The second thing Dylan mentioned, do we even want to trust you're an exceptional person, Mark?

If you simultaneously satisfied all of your intellectual. First of all, you had intellectual cravings as an 18 year old and that you satisfied them and simultaneously got a well rounded liberal education out of it all on your own, you're certainly in the minority. So first off, do you have the time? Second thing is, do you have the wherewithal to make that decision and make good choices? Right. And then the third thing is, are they available? Like if you went to the University of Michigan and there were no classes aligned with what you were interested in, because they were all the kind of things that you aren't interested in.

Like what if it was all queer theory and post feminist colonial literature in northern African states, you know, between 1873 and 1888, and that that was what you had to choose from, you wouldn't be satisfied either. Right. And I think that's also part of what Bloom is railing against.

40:14 Mark: Yeah. I think everybody has their own intellectual journey and has their own things that would best nourish them at that stage of their journey and to a uniform. Everybody reads the same thing. Great Books program is like, I know you all come from different backgrounds and have different appetites and are at different stages, but this is the menu. This is the thing that will enrich you. I just think that is horseshit.

40:39 Wes: Well, we got to make that choice at St. John's so St. John's where it's really rigid. Right. There's no electives and you choose to

40:45 Dylan: go to St. John's that's what you choose to do.

40:47 Wes: Yeah. And there's an enormous value. Yeah. With a group of 100 people reading all the same stuff and having a four year conversation and knowing that you all have the same. I mean, and you really cannot underestimate the value of that. Now does it matter? It's that and not the Eastern classics or something like that. I think you could do a really great job as well with say the Eastern classics. Although I am sympathetic to Bloom's argument, which is that in the spirit of self examination, you need to address those texts which are foundational to your culture because they form, even if unconsciously, we have a certain set of opinions and assumptions and things that we take for granted.

And they have their origins in this stuff. So it's a way of making those things come alive. It's like Socratic dialectic where instead of the opinions just being these dead accepted things, you go back to the source and engage in self examination. And you can't do that with texts that really don't form the foundation of your own society.

41:49 Seth: Think about our experience reading Confucius.

41:51 Dylan: That on the face of it, seems to make it problematic for the Chinese students that come to American colleges.

41:58 Mark: I just think for a philosophy of education book, there's not a lot of philosophy of education. He's given a theory of what is wrong with the human soul. And basically the solution is philosophy. You know, engagement with deep thinking is the way to address this is the way to kick us out of being a part of the they. You know, he doesn't use this Heideggerian language, but it reminds me quite a bit of what Heidegger, Kierkegaard or many other. You know, he was very. This is why I think he's very influenced by Nietzsche, that Nietzsche was concerned about conformity and people drifting along and not having great desires and not being able to think for themselves.

And just being passive. The subman. If we're going to bring in herd animals. Yes, yes, exactly. That is all legitimate and could have been made in a much shorter way and could have avoided a lot of the particular things that he picks on about whether it's affirmative action or, you know, talk about a. We shouldn't even go into it. People freaking hate him, what he has to say about affirmative action. But nowhere in here does it show me that engaging in a specifically Great Books program, as opposed to even some of these other university measures that he's proposing that he's objecting to, don't also provide legitimate ways to gain that sort of sense of self reflection.

In other words, the jump between. I have found that a Great Books program can be very enlivening to some students to. That is the only way that you could actually be enlivened in the way that would make you a full human being. Like, there's no serious discussion of alternative methods to the one that he's proposing. That's not the style of the book. That's not what the book's about.

43:39 Dylan: It's true.

43:40 Seth: I would just like to remind everybody that the book is not called the Closing of the Human Soul. It is called the Closing of the American Mind. And it's intended to tell a story about this guy's experience. 30 years teaching undergraduates at the University of Chicago and the change he's seen that's happened in what those students come to the university armed with the types of things they're interested in, the politics and the mission, the purpose of the universities in the context of the broader political and social changes that have happened in the country.

And what he's basically saying is his diagnosis is that we have in the process of becoming more and more equal, that realizing the democratic ideal. What that's meant is that we've just become more and more tolerant, which means that we've become more and more disconnected because everything is permitted. And the common language or the common shared set of aspirations or values in a true sense, as opposed to values that he rails against in the book is missing. And so he's advocating this as a response to that thing and not that saying, you have to go to St.

John's to have a soul.

44:52 Mark: I still think the first title was just the Closing of My American Mind he was writing about. I used to think that not everybody had to read the same books and now I think everybody has to read the same books.

45:05 Seth: That's an interesting and ironic read.

45:09 Mark: No, I think talking about the Crisis of nihilism we haven't really addressed. What did you think about this? Once you get rid of the. Being able to say objectively, the canon is a bunch of geniuses. Once you get rid of that strong point of view. He talks about it as a Roy Rogers ethic. I never met a man I didn't like. And this very much follows the kind of ethic that I have tried to have. Not because I'm being indiscriminate and saying everything, everything everybody has to say is great, but that when I encounter a new thing, whether it be a weird piece of music or a weird philosopher, I do my best to try to see why other people like it, what is good about it. So in other words, I have this openness that he is objecting to. He's objecting to me.

45:57 Wes: Somebody has written a psychoanalytic piece about Back to the Future. Like, I'm one of these people who's taken what he thinks is frivolous culture. I've taken it seriously. Right. That's one of the things I think he.

46:10 Dylan: Yeah. Bloom would just hate both of you.

46:11 Seth: No, he wouldn't.

46:13 Dylan: He wouldn't hate them. No, that's true.

46:15 Wes: I couldn't have been more of someone who's brought up in this religion, not just at St. John's beforehand, like St. John's was the only place worth going in my household. My mom and my dad met in the classroom of a St. John's graduate, and they were both in their 30s and they had never been to college before. It was a community college. And actually this professor had been a professor at Columbia. He left because his friend Charles Van Doren was kicked out after the quiz show disgrace. He went down to Savannah and a great professor. But at this little community college in Savannah, and my mom and my dad met there, and that became their religion.

It became my religion from before I can even, you know, I don't remember any time before that. You know, I grew up with the philosophy and literature bookshelves, all of that stuff, and thinking that nothing was more important than these books. So, that being said, despite my strong indoctrination into that cult and still my credible sympathy for it, I don't see how to justify the more dramatic claims, including the dramatic claims about how it's going to help you lead a good life, it didn't for me, and I'd be an enormous hypocrite if I tried to pretend it did.

I think it really helped fashion my mind and give me some acumen and, you know, and it Gave me a lot of ideas about what it would be to live a good life if only I could have actually executed and done the things that I was supposed to do. And this is why I'm sympathetic to the more therapeutic approach like psychoanalysis. I think that people's problems, in a way, are more basic. And, you know, it's sort of a positive, elite, aristocratic view where you start at a certain baseline and your goal is to become noble, where most people are just fucked up.

And getting up to that baseline would be great. Do you spend your time getting to know yourself in this more basic sense? You guys can see the kind of contrast I'm drawing. I'm conflicted between them, and I think they're not unrelated. Right. So I'd see psychoanalysis as just an extension of virtue ethics, starting with Aristotle, going through Nietzsche and then into Freud. That's a lot about where I'm conflicted and why I've said so many conflicting things. I know if people are going to say something about that, how I completely contradicted myself.

Yes, I did. Because I'm conflicted about this. I guess I am ultimately conflicted about the utility of this to the soul or its ultimate importance to the good life and to the soul. That, for me, I'm skeptical about. I'm skeptical about that for psychoanalysis as well, by the way. I don't believe in that either, in all honesty. I think it should be that way. It should be the case that self examination helps you lead a better life. Let me put it that way. But does it? I'm agnostic.

49:06 Mark: So despite what I was saying before about maybe you don't need intellectual history, I find it tremendously satisfying. And this is why we do it. With so many of our episodes to delve into how did we get our notions of democracy or whatever the thing that we're talking about, or the notion of self over time, that's. That's one of the great joys of choosing all these different readings and relating them to each other. I just think that it's a luxury. It's not necessary. I hope the fact that we're engaged in this at all means that we are the kind of students that Bloom would be okay with.

49:37 Unknown speaker: Right?

49:37 Mark: As opposed to the no values, no intellectual curiosity. Pretty much anybody listening to this at all. Probably he'd be okay. I don't know. I'm maybe being overly generous on his behalf, but the fact that you've gotten to this far into a podcast about his book probably puts you already in the enlightened camp compared to the nihilism that he's complaining about.

50:00 Dylan: I feel complicated about this book because even when I read it the first time, back when I was, you know, 19 years old, I found part of it really positively provoking and part of it really freaking irritating. When I was rereading it, what I found that I appreciated about it is that despite all of his bluster and crankiness, it seemed to me that Bloom loved students and loved more than anything else, being witness to their minds and opening up and growing and flourishing and being part of that activity. And that's something pretty awesome and admirable.

And even if he is cranky, he doesn't come across to me as tyrannical or even if he's extraordinarily strong opinioned and maybe really wrong on a number of points. What I find myself particularly annoyed with is, might be my sort of Midwestern democratic tendencies regarding the power of education to raise a person up. That education really isn't for the elite people to help rule the world. Well, you know, it's not a project for all the alcibiades of the world to tame them in order to have them not tyrannically destroy the community, but rather it's to help ordinary people expand their views of the world and their opportunities and to provide them with more tools to flourish on their own.

Whether it actually turns out that way. I'm sure that it doesn't always turn out that way. But I do think that education enlivens those tools and makes it more possible to do so, leads to more flexible and adaptable and capable people. And I've always felt that way about education. That's particularly college education. That strain of elitism I find just distasteful.

51:57 Mark: Yeah. And much against my own prior expressed wishes, I have to bring up at least part of what he says in the context of affirmative action as just a matter of addressing exactly what you were talking about. That he says a social need was recognized pretty much, why are there just only white dudes here in Cornell or whatever. And so there were attempts made in recruiting to bring in a more diverse population. And he says, but these people weren't prepared for what was going on. So of course a lot of them, either we had to fail them out or we had to just kind of wink and give them good grades.

Anyway. He had stated elsewhere in here that the way that the university shows its value, shows that it is a beacon on the hill, is by having high standards. You have to adjust yourself to us. In other words, we're not actually going to educate you. We're not going to engage you and find out where you're at and improve you and make you a more whole human being. We are just going to have our curriculum and our standards and they are what they are and you have to show up here already knowing how to write at a certain level or Too bad. He thought it was a it would be criminal to compromise our standards to actually teach less prepared individuals, which is what you would have to do, he thinks, to have a more diverse populace.

So putting aside his claims about whether that's actually the case, seems like you could get plenty of, you know, a more diverse crowd with financial policies or different outreach policies without having to change the standards. But putting that aside, shouldn't the goal be to actually, as you were saying, Dylan, to enrich the lives of the people at large? Shouldn't noticing that it's only certain people of a certain cultural background are showing up? Your institution is maybe a call for you to examine how you are teaching and not just a call for changing in recruiting policies.

53:48 Dylan: I'm going to be interested to continue this conversation about liberal education and what kind of education is a liberal one as we're going forward.

53:58 Mark: Seth, any last thoughts?

54:00 Seth: Oh, gosh, yeah. I mean, I think I share somewhat of the ambivalence that everybody does about, you know, his strain of elitism to some extent, but also sympathy with the program. Mark, I will say that the reason I chose Reed St. John's was very much in play for me as well. But I ultimately decided that I thought the curriculum was would be a little too restraining for me. And Reed had a very conservative curriculum, but it's based around requirements in certain areas. But they still have the core humanities curriculum. And I ended up taking several classes in that whole series.

So I kind of balanced it out. I wasn't as ambitious and self directed as you, but Bloom kind of characterizes a mission of the university, the role of the university in the literature, liberal democratic society, as a bulwark against what de Tocqueville warned us, namely the tyranny of the majority or the tyranny of mass opinion. And the idea is that democracy is the great equalizer. Everybody in the society, basically, in the absence of any alternative ideas, you'll go along with the majority because that's all you know. Right. So the purpose of the university is to be a gadfly, to inject friction into the intellectual process.

And most of our conversation tonight focused not on its role in the society, but on its role or the process really of self realization, self fulfillment, self actualization of teenagers when they go to college. And it's almost anachronistic because obviously Bloom, the changes in technology, the fact that we exist, and by we, I mean the four of us, and this podcast, we are providing a channel and a method outside of the context of traditional higher education that people can engage with these conversations, engage with these topics, engage with these texts.

Something that I don't think Bloom could have conceived of. And I think that the advances in technology, which on one hand are infantilizing and making facile our communications with each other and our relationships, but also are enabling people to reach out and encounter each other. You know, when he was writing, if you wanted access to a decent library, you had to go to a university. There was no way to get access to the texts themselves other than to go someplace where the gate was being kept. You could go to a bookstore, but you had to live in a college town to find a bookstore or order it.

And you didn't know what to order and you didn't know what to do. And you know, nowadays that's all changed, right? You can go and say, type in Google, what book should I read to be smart? Or something like that, or what book should I read to understand the Western tradition? And you'll get the full curriculum and you'll be able to link the text with the Greek and the English side by side and arguments about translations and all that kind of stuff. So I'm not sure that the issue is live in the same way as far as what he talks about, the solution.

But as far as the problem goes, what's interesting now is that the fear or the pressure to conform isn't coming from outside anymore. It's the students themselves. Students are now voluntarily and aggressively restraining their own thought and walking away from the liberal tradition. You know, they're violently enforcing this new egalitarianism and tolerance to the detriment. He would have been shocked now, you know, the students would have come into his room and said, we're not going to read Dead White males. In the 80s, it was kind of like a protest on the fringe.

Well, now it's the mainstream narrative and the mass view, the tyranny of the majority has now entered into the entire institution, but not through the administration or through the state houses that run the state, that manage the budget for the state universities. Instead, it's the students themselves. And so I think if they can survive this current, I think you'll see a radical transformation. But I'm not sure that they can. And that's where I kind of align with Wes on a lack of optimism about the future of higher education as we all have experienced it.

58:00 Mark: Yeah, we should say that some of what he was objecting to, I guess at Cornell. Right, was student pressure to changes. In fact, it was in the 60s. It was like doesn't he talk about some particular they showed up with guns

58:12 Dylan: and held professors hostage.

58:14 Mark: Yes. To like demand that the curriculum be changed to be less dead white males. Is that right?

58:20 Dylan: More or less.

58:21 Mark: And he did not like the fact that the administration immediately folded to in face of that that like, oh, you're

58:27 Dylan: clearly traumatized by the whole thing.

58:29 Mark: Yeah. But just that there's some comparison if you want to say what's going on now is that the students, as Seth just said, are the ones demanding this change that he would be. This is exactly relevant if you think that the academy should resist these calls by millennials or whatever for this kind of change. Well, for next time we're going to read some selections on liberal education. You can get the exact list@pre partiallyexaminedlife.com upcoming folks should let us know what they think about this at partiallyexaminedlife.com you can respond to the blog post there, follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Get in the Facebook group and there's lots of conversation going on in many ways. Want to announce there is again a follow up recording to this episode. Wes and Seth and I all participated, getting more into the specific things he says about Nietzsche, about Freud, some of Bloom's other historical claims. And Seth catches us up on what's been going on with him, his thoughts about Lysistrata since he wasn't on that episode. That follow up discussion is available for Partially Examined Life Citizens or $5 Patreon subscribers. Our closing song, since we've been talking about great books and great geniuses, great thinkers, is called Greatness Parentheses the Aspiration song.

It is by Colin Moulding, whom you may know from his days in the band XTC. His new unit is called TC&I. I talked to him about that on Nakedly Examined Music, episode 74. You can go subscribe to that@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com thank you so much for listening and for letting yourself be enlightened by this genius to genius contact between you and Allan Bloom. So thank you and good night.

1:00:10 Seth: Good night. Good night.

1:00:11 Dylan: Good night.

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