Allan Bloom's American Mind

Book TV used this weekend to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Allan Bloom's controversial book, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. The "celebration" was actually a broadcast of two panel discussions from an anniversary event held at the Manhattan Institute on October 7. Probably the most important thing to come out of those panels was an appreciation of just how slippery the very concept of a "closed" (and, therefore, "open") mind can be. Nevertheless, one wonders whether or not much was to be gained by academic pundits puzzling over such a concept justified the comparative neglect given to the more charged language of Bloom's book. Little was said about whether or not our institutions of higher education have, indeed, "failed democracy" or "impoverished the souls" of their students.

Therefore I think it may be more important to address a more fundamental question behind that accusation of "impoverishment," which was the neglect of "great books of Western civilization" in favor of a more diverse approach to "cultural relativism." Regular readers know that I have a great deal of respect for those "great books." I both read and cite them frequently; and I hold them up as examples of resources whose "knowledge half-life" is far greater than most of what gets published these days (particularly when the publisher is a business school press). On the other hand I have a great deal of trouble with trying to orient education around any canon, particularly one with a Western bias. Yes, we should read Plato and Aristotle; but I agree with Carl Gustav Jung's point that we cannot read these philosophers without some fundamental knowledge of the social context in which they were situated. Put more bluntly, we should not admire "great Greek thinkers" without ignoring that they probably could not have done their thinking without that population of helots and slaves doing all the day-to-day grunt work. Similarly, while I have great respect for the texts of both the Old and New Testaments, I am very concerned that they should be taken as "received wisdom," rather than artifacts of that historical process that constitutes the development of Christianity, a process that is probably least known to those who embrace the faith most passionately.

The other problem with any canon is that it, too, is an artifact that becomes fixed at a particular moment in time; but time does not stop with the definition of the canon. This is why I recently addressed the question of whether or not a piece of music that had been composed during my lifetime should now constitute a representative "emblem" of the Zeitgeist of the twentieth century. Temporal distance changes the priority we assign to events, and it probably also changes how we perceive Western civilization in the context of other cultures. (Consider, for example, the recent revived interest in the Korean War that now addresses questions of cultural misinterpretation.)

Does this mean that we should still be reading Bloom's book twenty years after its publication? On the basis of the two panels I watched, I have my doubts. While the book raised many questions from the general, rather than academic, press when it appeared, it now seems to have settled into a state of neglect that it probably deserves (except for its impact on the neoconservative movement, which was not a minor one). On the other hand the issues that Bloom tried to tackle, those questions of education failing democracy and impoverishing the souls of students, are as important today as they were when the book appeared. Indeed, the very questions of the extent to which faith has undermined reason and what the consequences of that undermining may be should be approached with the greatest urgency; but perhaps the most apparent consequence of the undermining is the general lack to will to even recognize that those questions are there to be considered!