The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1987-04-01) Hardcover

"The Lonely Crowd" is heavy going because of the writing style. It is densely written in the sense that any given paragraph usually contains numerous distantly related ideas, with, to me, often little logical structure. It does eventually get across the point that the migration from the pre-Enlightenment view of man to that of the rationalistic, reductionist view (denying much of what makes us human, much of which cannot be rationally understood) has resulted in a profound loss of our humanity. This would seem, at least to me, to be quite apart from the title's apparent intent. It is in the last few chapters that he deals with the total disintegration of academia from an environment of learning, of understanding where we came from, of understanding the philosophical underpinnings of Western culture, to one of parroting the views that various special interest groups(minorities, moneyed industries and donors, the government, others) wish to hear. Academic freedom is history, probably never to be retrieved.

Having read a number of books by "social scientists" I get the impression that Bloom's writing style is the rule rather than the exception.

Says very eloquently what I've been thinking for years. If you're concerned about the dumbing down of America and how PC is killing us, this book will confirm your worst fears. If you're an educator, you must read this book. Don't wait for some idiot like Wolf Blitzer to spoon feed you the synopsis.

Obviously a brilliant man, it's also obvious that the author spent his whole life in the womb of academia, and as a result he missed experiencing first hand large swaths of human existence: living in the real world and having children of his own would have altered much of the tone of this tome, and would have undoubtedly deepened his wisdom.

If he did not know that living in the real world would help to temper the steel of his razor wit, then he may not have been as self-aware as he seems.

If he DID know that living in the real world would lend a balance to his thoughts, but he chose NOT to do so, then we have to ask why ... personally, I would be concerned about his courage. Was he too lazy to get out of academe for a decade, or too scared, or too comfortable?

After decades of avoiding this book I was tricked into reading it by a comment on an education-related article in the NYT that claimed "everything" of interest about the topic under discussion had already been said by Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind". I guess I should have known better. Here's what I will say. "Closing" is a poignant and beautiful character study of a man who, as a result of cultural and socio-economic change, has gradually watched his neatly constructed world fall apart and all the things in it that he had thought crucial plummet into obscurity and disuse. There were times when I got a sneaking suspicion that I must actually be reading a cleverly constructed work of fiction based on a conceit so ingenious and airtight that everyone from the publishers on down had been completely fooled into believing it. But, that's probably not the case. Instead, what we're left with is the cranky rantings of a man who just cannot come to grips with the the era he lives in and so goes around inventing stories about why the death of "his" world is essentially the apocalypse. He specializes in a kind of one-two punch where he'll say something like "no one seriously reads Shakespeare any more" - an arguable point that can at least be supported by experience and analysis if we care to do the work - and then follows it up with an outrageous statement of the form "and this means that no one can really understand what it is to be human" - a piece of nonsense that is so ill-supported on the face of it that it's amazing Bloom's editors didn't chime in at some point and say, "Hey Allan, are you sure you actually want to say that? You sound a little bit unhinged here." But, perhaps that's the problem. My guess is that this book was, for the most part, an exercise in preaching to the choir. These are the things that a large portion of Bloom's circle - older academics and their community of true believers - really wanted to believe about the way the world was going and it was Bloom's job to write it out for them. Sad.

After running across the thousandth quote from this book, I decided maybe I ought to read it in its entirety. I couldn't get through it. Very dense and dry. Rather a polemic of conclusions with few interesting examples or anecdotes that might enliven it a bit. I couldn't see reading the whole thing unless I were writing a dissertation on the subject and just had to know this book.

This book is one of the few books that profoundly deepened my view of the world. I first tried to read it in high school, but I found it incomprehensible. I'm in my mid-twenties now, and I decided to go back to this book to see if it really was hogwash. Far from being hogwash, it may be the most profound book I've ever read.

Bloom starts, in Part I, with a critique of American culture. Bloom isn't lambasting just to prove that "it was better in my day", but rather to show us that it could be better. We've lost key virtues that are making our lives hollow. Our relationships are casual choices, not lifelong commitments we must deal with. We have free sex, free divorce, our popular music is trash, and our embrace of multiculturalism has led us to a closing of our minds. We've been told to rid ourselves our elitism, sexism, racism, Western-ism , etc. We were told to rid ourselves of all our biases so that we may be more "open". However, in the process of destroying our biases, we've replaced them with nothing. We have no grounds on which to engage other cultures and determine what is best. As a concrete example, my girlfriend told me about a class she just had, where they watched a video of a man who held his arm above his head for most of his life. He had done this so long that his arm had atrophied, and the man believed that his sacrifice and suffering would please his god. After my girlfriend told me this, we both sat there silently and unknowing of what to make of this. Far from being open and accepting of this man, we dismissed him because we didn't have any way of understanding or judging his actions.

In Part II, Bloom explains how we got to this state. He traces American thinking back from the Enlightenment philosophers all the way to Nietzsche, and Weber. He explains that much of the language we use, "we just have different values" or "I just need to find myself", comes from Germanic philosophy. The language we use to describe ourselves, our society, everything really, comes from Germany but without our knowing. We're using a foreign language without understanding its meaning, and it's eroding the Enlightenment values our nation was founded upon. There's an abandonment of thinking "what is best", and we now think "there is no good, only individual values". But, in Nietzsche, the strong would assert their values on the world, whereas in America, none of us do. Our culture, our thinking, and ourselves are decaying.

In Part III, Bloom ties all of this with the decay of modern universities and the strengthening link between the universities and society. The link between universities is strengthening, to both's detriment. The university, which is supposed to keep a cool distance from the hysterias of the public, is swept away in them, and in the process they abandon the search for truth. As of the time of writing, there are many protests that have recently occurred at universities, like at Mizzou, Yale, and Nothwestern, centered around racial equality and understanding the black "values" or "point-of-view". It's no surprise that institutions which bend over backwards to be accommodating to multiculturalism are the very same places where segregation of thought and race are the strongest. The whites sit with each other in the cafeteria, the asians together, the blacks together, and the Latinos together. The Closing of their minds has happened, and this closing is leading the way at our universities.

I have tried to do my best to illustrate what this book is. This book will give you a perspective on the happenings of America that you won't be able to find anywhere else. Bloom recommends reading the Great Books as a way to remedy this illness. He has certainly convinced me, and I'll be starting on The Iliad pretty soon.

i have gotten midway through this book, and while it's a good read (especially bloom's summation of modern political philosophy) there are some flaws that i've picked up, especially its tendency to generalize american culture. also, he attacks marxism(if i'm interpreting this correctly) as being boring and outdated, intimating that capital is not worth the time one needs to spend to get a thorough understanding of marx's critique...is there anything more anti-intellectual and AGAINST the pursuit of knowledge than to degrade a work that may give the reader a different view of the world, even if it is myopically economic? mind candy is good.

This book contains a comprehensive exposition of Allan Bloom's views on education and expands on the view he expresses in his long introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile or On Education. One need only read "Emile" to discover the truth of Bloom's statement that a reading of original texts allows one to form a vital understanding of issues that a reading of shallow rehashes of such texts does not. Bloom discusses in this book two types of Openness, how he proposes to re-invigorate college curriculum, and how his suggestion to use original texts [Great Books] is vilified by the Three great parts of the University today, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities.

A paradoxical aspect of Bloom's book is that he deals with two forms of openness and goes on to show how what is called openness in the first form actually amounts to a "closing of the mind". Here are two kinds of openness and the effects that Bloom says each has on students:

I. Openness of indifference -- humbling of intellectual pride; be whatever you want to be.
A. Stunts students' desire for self-discovery by making all endeavors of equal value.
B. Leads to the abandonment of their requirements to take languages and study philosophy of science
C. Activates their amour-propre -- self-love or esteem based on others' opinions (polls)
D. Teaches them a loose interpretation of documents such as the Constitution, a waffling philosophy based on "it all depends".
E. Closes them to doubt about so many things impeding progress. (page 42)

II. Openness to the quest for knowledge and certitude -- history and cultures as examples
A. Encourages students to want to know what things from history and culture are good for them, what will make them happy.
B. Activates their amour-soi - natural and healthy self-love or esteem arising from within oneself independent of the opinions of others.
C. Teaches them a close interpretation of the Constitution -- "government of laws" D. Teaches them that a true openness means a closed-ness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.(page 42)

How does one question this Openness I, amour-propre, which is based on a philosophical premise that is recursive, that develops its own proof out of itself?

[page 39] This premise is unproven and dogmatically asserted for what are largely political reasons. History and culture are interpreted in the light of it, and then are said to prove the premise.

This is the Great Closing that Bloom promises in the title of his book:

[page 34] Actually openness [ Openness I ] results in American conformism - out there in the rest of the world is a drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the life-styles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise men in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life -- except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru. . . . None of this concerns those who promote the new curriculum.

Note: this is the debate that has been raging in Congress for the past 12 months: the opponents of presidential removal taking the Openness I or amour-propre position, and the supporters of president removal taking the Openness II or amour-soi position. Opponents say it makes no difference whether he committed these "trivial" acts of perjury and obstruction of justice and the supporters say the certitude of justice requires that commission of the acts of perjury and obstruction of justice require an accounting no matter who does it. The enormous public debate has as its basis these two issues of openness that Allan Bloom wrote about in the middle 1980's and published in this book.

The meanings of the two forms of self-esteem are taken from Bloom's Introduction to his translation of Emile, the famous book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where, on page 11 he explains what he means by amour-propre and contrasts it with amour-soi. Again one is struck by the poll-based self-esteem arising from others that the opponents of the president's removal tout so highly, which contrasts dramatically with the self-esteem based on the interpretation of the Constitution of the supporters of removal.

That first form of openness, the openness of indifference or amour-propre, is at the root of the wave of relativism that swept into university campuses in the 1960's, actually broke down the doors, occupied administrative offices, and held professors at gunpoint . This openness is a relativism that says "all endeavors are of equal value" -- that the study of Shakespeare equal, eg, to the study of how hummingbirds fly.

Using these concepts of amour propre and amour soi of Rousseau, Bloom shows that this relativism is based on a self-esteem that comes from others' opinions, a poll-based self-esteem. So that what determines the curriculum is what's popular and easy to understand currently in society.

The other kind of openness he talks about is an openness to study historical and cultural texts and material in their original form, and to be open to develop one's own thoughts from them rather than accepting at first glance, without questioning, the opinions of so-called experts in the field in their textbooks, which may be scholarly but necessarily shallow rehashes of the original texts. Only by such independent and internal self-assessment can one arrive at amour soi -- a self-love and esteem that comes from within oneself rather than from others opinions.

How does Allan Bloom say that we might re-invigorate the college and university curriculum? He suggests that a return to the use of original texts and materials is key. To assign students Dante's "Inferno" rather than a synopsis of classical poems to read. To read Shakespeare plays, not a critical review of his plays. To read Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Freud in the original and to form one's own judgments as what are the important questions and what the answers to these questions are for oneself. That method can have the salubrious effect of actually leading the students to discover a great value, a vital understanding that can only come from directly confronting the authors in their original words in context, and from that discovery to create a royal road to future learning in their students hearts.

Bloom gives the reader one caveat: that we should avoid the mistake of the Great Books Groups who tend to treat the Books like dollars in a bank account where the goal is to get as many dollars in it as possible. The goal should be rather to emphasize as the goal the reading and questioning that arises during the reading -- the process is what's important, not how many Books one reads.

During the decades of the 60's and 70's the onslaught of relativism was led by the Humanities professors because their fields lacked the objective criteria of the natural and social sciences. The other two fields were less affected by the revolution of relativism, but became alienated from the reading of the Great Books or original works of famous authors in their fields.

The Natural Sciences saw reading of the original works of natural scientists as a matter of mere historical interest, better suited for electives in the humanities, if a student were to choose one. With the increased specialization, however, fewer students took such electives. Besides that, their professors told them or implied by the disdain in their tone of voice that such electives were a waste of time and were an unnecessary detour on the way to a career in science.

The Social Sciences felt a bit threatened by the original texts because these Great Books were teaching many of the same subjects as they were, but in a way that allowed the students to think independently of what their professors would like them to. So the Social Scientists' attitude was that original texts were mostly irrelevant to any practical application, and if one wanted to study them, one should do so on one's own time. The Social Scientists' offered instead composite courses, trendiness, mere popularization and a lack of substantive rigor, all of which led Bloom to claim:

[page 340] The so-called knowledge explosion and increasing specialization have not filled up the college years but emptied them.

Meantime the natural sciences and the social sciences were still able to demonstrate a usefulness for their fields and stayed on track, a track that became more rigid and narrowed in focus, leading to careerism, producing a technological automaton rather than a whole human being. But the social sciences were not out of the woods because in their zest to get the facts that would characterize a true science they were seduced by the siren song of their agenda and led into making the facts fit their agenda rather than fostering an agenda which fit their facts.

[page 354] Hobbes said if the fact that two and two makes four were to become a matter of political relevance, there would be a faction to deny it.

This may sound farcical, if it weren't so true today. One need only look at the events surrounding the presidential impeachment and Senate trial to find ample examples of such denial. Bloom says that "all parties in a democracy are jeopardized when passion can sweep the facts before it." [page 355] Who would have thought the crimes of perjury and obstruction of justice would not add up to a crime that would remove an elected official from office?

Humanities professors had an unexpectedly tepid reaction to the Great Books that provide the very basis of the humanities. And indeed some professors are strong supporters of these classics, but some humanities disciplines are "crusty specialities" that would prefer to avoid the classics in their natural state. Other disciplines want to join the natural sciences and feel a need to overcome their "mythic past" as represented by the classic works that are their very foundation. As a result, humanities professors often attack the learning provided by the Great Books, but such attacks stem from the shallow teaching of scholarly re-hashes of the Great Books, rather than the "vital, authentic understanding" that can come from a direct reading and studying of the original books. Thus the Humanities whose curriculum stems from the Great Books tended to downplay the GB's -- a criticism that was based more on the shallowness of scholarly rehashes of GB's than the GB's themselves. A common question of professors and students alike was, "Of what relevance is Shakespeare and Milton to current problems of the world?"

What happened during the Sixties is that the belief that no real standards existed outside of the natural sciences led to the "debauching and grade inflation" of the humanities and social sciences while the natural sciences remained largely intact. The humanities professors led a revolt that unfortunately redounded to their own near demise. The result for the Humanities professors has been less than a propitious one:

[page 352] The lack of student interest, the near disappearance of language study, the vanishing of jobs for Ph.D.'s, the lack of public sympathy, came from the overturning of the old order, where their place was assured. They have gotten what they deserved, but we have unfortunately all lost.

[page 353] Humanists ran like lemmings into the sea, thinking they would refresh and revitalize themselves in it. They drowned.

[page 19] The teacher . . . must constantly try to look toward the goal of human completeness and back at the natures of his students here and now.

Thus Bloom says teachers must, like Janus, look in two directions: into the present to assess the natures of their students and into the future to the goals of human completeness. One key seems to me from where do the teachers get the goals? From the students who are just becoming aware of their life's goals or from historical and cultural achievements as embodied in traditional curriculum? The other key is how shall the teacher to assess the natures of their students. By asking the students what they think they are capable of or interested in? Or by applying standards proven over the years to stretch students beyond their own perceptions of what they are capable of?

Bloom says on page 20 that the teacher should be like a midwife -- someone who assists Nature in the birth of a robust child. The educated adult is not created by the teacher any more than the midwife is responsible for the creation of the baby whose birth they assist in.

For teachers to challenge students today with Openness II (amour-soi) concepts is to expose themselves to having the question thrown in their face, "Are you an absolutist?" And the question will be hurled with the same indignation as "Are you a racist?" or "Are you a bigot?" The attitude is one of: anyone with strong opinions, whether justified or not, is a "true believer" and is therefore a real and present danger to the student and the entire culture.

Bloom says on page 27, "But when there are no shared goals or vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?" How did we evolve or devolve to such a state? Bloom says that this state of affairs was foreshadowed when we attempted to get religious sects to adhere to the tenets of the Constitution by relegating religion to the "realm of opinion as opposed to knowledge." (page 28) Once this drastic change in epistemology was accomplished, it was a simple process to extend that same way of thinking to all beliefs, including the beliefs that supported traditional curriculums.

One foreshadowing of this switch from the traditional strictures of Openness II or amour-soi to the unfettered license of Openness I or amour-propre in our socio-political milieu came when Oliver Wendell Holmes cited the standard of "clear and present danger" to replace any principled approach to determining whether a given behavior is acceptable in our society. Again, the impeachment/removal debate of 1998 and 1999 reflects a deep debate over whether we will become a country that makes decisions based on this "imprecise and practically meaningless standard" or not. Bloom calls that a folly.

[page 30] This folly means that men are not permitted to seek for the natural human good and admire it when found, for such discovery is coeval [existing over the same time period] with the discovery of the bad and contempt for it. Instinct and intellect must be suppressed by education. The natural soul is to be replaced with an artificial one.

Gertrude Stein says in her Everybody's Autobiography, "To me when a thing is really interesting it is when there is no question and no answer, if there is then already the subject is not interesting and it is so, that is the reason that anything for which there is a solution is not interesting that is the trouble with governments and utopias and teaching, the things not that can be learnt but that can be taught are not interesting."

The basic prescription from Allan Bloom is that we put back some of what the 60's radicals removed in their haste for revolution and change. That, instead of revolution, we need evolution to a broad-based curriculum and that does not necessitate that we throw out the essentials of an education in the classics of culture and literature. That we must study wholes, not just bits and pieces of classics regurgitated in textbooks, but complete works of classical authors in context. That we must read original texts in order to achieve a vital, living understanding of the issues that form the background of our current world. That our understanding of these issues is every bit as crucial for future success as any career-specific training. The alternative is not to be savored:

[page 337] The practical effects of unwillingness to think positively about the contents of a liberal education are on the one hand, to ensure that all the vulgarities of the world outside the university will flourish within it, and, on the other, to impose a much harsher and more illiberal necessity on the student - the one given by the imperial imperious demands of the specialized disciplines unfiltered by unifying thought.

Instead of a unified scheme of liberal education, we find no organization, no "tree of knowledge", "no vision, no set of competing visions of what an educated human being is." Students in the face of a bewildering array of choices are left "dispirited", unable to make a reasonable choice. There is no hint of "great mysteries", "new and higher motives", and that human life might be improved by what he is about to learn. To counter this decisional malaise Bloom suggests that we develop models for a unified use of university resources so that, with the proliferation of current curriculum, the student has a glide path to an education rather than a tortuous random walk through a 400 page catalog.

All of these things together can only be implemented if there is a vision from the top. Only with such vision stemming from the university hegemonies can there be a re-focusing on the vital aspects of a university education. Only then can a liberal education in the classical sense arise once more.

Bloom sees that one form of openness, relativism or amour-propre, really amounts to a "closing of the American mind". He suggests that one way of re-invigorating the college curriculum is by adding back a study of the Great Books and classical authors whose books fell into disuse during the 1960's. With this kind of refocusing of educational resources and re-direction of college students he expect that students will come to understand that before one can really experience the thrill of liberation, one has to have something to really believe in. That experience of really believing can come whenever a student fully studies classical authors in their original works, and after fully believing in what they've read, learn to question and evaluate the beliefs those original authors held as self-evident to them.

Bloom sees that one form of openness, relativism or amour-propre, really amounts to a "closing of the American mind", and that the radicals who promote great plans to equalize economic and social opportunities are doomed to failure. It was a similar closing of the French people's mind that allowed popularly-supported paid vacations to become more important than national defense.

[page 239] As an image of our current intellectual condition, I keep being reminded of the newsreel pictures of Frenchmen splashing happily in the water at the seashore, enjoying the paid vacations legislated by Léon Blum's Popular Front government. It was 1936, the same year Hitler was permitted to occupy the Rhineland. All our big causes amount to that kind of vacation.

Bloom suggests that one way of re-invigorating the college curriculum is by adding back a study of the Great Books and classical authors whose books fell into disuse during the 1960's. With this kind of refocusing of educational resources and re-direction of college students he expect that students will come to understand that before one can really experience the thrill of liberation, one has to have something to really believe in. That experience of really believing can come whenever students fully study classical authors in their original works, and, after fully believing in what they've read, learn to question and evaluate the beliefs those original authors held as self-evident to them. Until we and our students do that for ourselves, we are like the shepherds in Bloom's metaphor:

[page 239] We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part. All that is necessary is a careful excavation to provide them with life-enhancing models. We need history, not to tell us what happened, or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain and make a future possible. This is our educational crisis and opportunity.

This metaphor reminds me of one crafted by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in his Wisdom of the Sands (Original title in French: Citadelle).

[page 19] Thus men destroy their best possession, the meaning of things: on feast days they pride themselves on standing out against old custom, and betraying their traditions, and toasting their enemy. True, they may feel some qualm as they go about their deeds of sacrilege. So long as there is sacrilege. So long as there still is something against which they revolt. Thus for a while they continue trading on the fact that their foe still breathes, and the ghostly presence of the laws still hampers them enough for them to feel like outlaws. But presently the very ghost dissolves into thin air, and then the rapture of revolt is gone, even the zest of victory forgotten. And now they yawn. On the ruins of the palace they have laid out a public square; but once the pleasure of trampling its stones with upstart arrogance has lost its zest, they begin to wonder what they are doing here, on this noisy fairground. And now, lo and behold, they fall to picturing, dimly as yet, a great house with a thousand doors, with curtains that billow on your shoulders and slumbrous anterooms. Perchance they dream even of a secret room, whose secrecy pervades the whole vast dwelling. Thus, though they know it not, they are pining for my father's palace where every footstep had a meaning.

In the radical fervor of the 60's, great buildings of curriculum were torn to the ground, and now students and professors alike have begun once more picturing that great house, their father's university, "where every step had a meaning."

Bloom says that as a young teacher at Cornell he debated a professor of psychology who bragged about how he removed prejudices from his students. Bloom told the professor in rebuttal that he created prejudices in his students, beliefs that they could someday with work and diligence transcend.

In short, Bloom says, "One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation." That may indeed be the kind of "liberation" that is at the very root of what we mean by "liberal education."

Read fully in DIGESTWORLD #142 by Bobby Matherne

OK--the brilliant part first. The author is as learned a man as you'll ever come across, and the sheer amount of references to various Western thinkers and philosophers illustrate compellingly how shallow and lacking our education is--even at the highest levels!! He illustrates clearly how our schools fail to teach subjects that at one time were an essential part of a college education--in fact I credit this book with my ongoing efforts to get better acquainted with the great thinkers he discusses so eloquently. And quite honestly, it was out of embarrassment--the book humbled me so much that I felt compelled to learn more. In that sense, the book certainly served a purpose!

Now for the frustrating part---Bloom does an incredible job of outlining the problem, but I really don't see him offering any kind of solution. I think if he had his way he would turn back the clock to a time where the university was reserved for the "aristocracy", if you will. This is where I believe he comes across as elitist as it seems to me he believes that the "philosophical life" should be reserved for only the "best and brightest."

If the rating system allowed for it--I'd give this 3 1/2 stars--the extra half star for the author's thoroughly comprehensive overview of Western philosophy. I just wish he could have offered a remedy more satisfying than a wistful look at the past!

Basic premise is interesting and important, but large portions of the book are written in long-winded and vague language, piling abstraction upon abstraction in meandering trip to nowhere, with little apparent structure. It's way longer than it needs to be.

Bloom argues that the popular belief that "everything is relative" (historicism) leads to intellectual stagnation. A student who does not believe in any absolutes cannot be taught, by definition. The teacher has nothing to offer them, since all belief is merely culturally constructed opinion. The students have no interest in learning anything other than specialized subjects that will make them the most money. Students of business and natural science are like children with big toys, having no sense of direction or purpose, no enjoyment in the great books or in older cultures and learning. Bloom also prods feminism and the sexual revolution and argues that all feminism really got women was an increased burden, since feminism made women generally more independent, and made it easier for men to run out on them and leave them with the kids at the first sign of trouble.

Bloom's basic premise is genius. His conclusion, however, is quite shallow. He's an atheist. He doesn't ultimately believe in absolute truth or objective meaning, so whatever conclusions he draws will necessarily be inconsistent. If there's no truth or meaning to anything, then Bloom's conclusion isn't actually any "better" or "more true" than the conclusion of the students who are interested only in sex, drugs, money, and rock and roll. He basically just points to the intellectual life of man as being man's highest aim. In the end though, given his premises, what's the point? Bloom tries to find meaning and truth for man, but is ultimately unsuccessful.

All in all though, one of the best book I've ever read. This is a fantastic treatment of how we got here, and the intellectual problems that plague our time.

For my money Bloom losses himself in aged historonics that serve no purpose and contribute nothing to his theme. Perhaps without knowing it Bloom presents yet another reason for the closing of the American mind. Needlessly starting an argument from a viewpoint of hundreds of years ago.

I just finished reading "The Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom (published in 1987). I highly recommend it not only as a historical synopsis of Western philosophical thought from Socrates forward, but more importantly as a historical tracing of the effects of this progression of thought through the world. It also includes a damning assessment of the 1960s for those who wish any further nudge, or perhaps an opponent, in this dialogue.

The book seems to me, paradoxically perhaps, both expansive in scope and reductive in conclusions, much how fundamental scientific principles eventually take form, once sufficient scope is included, and apparently disparate phenomena are explained via a simple encapsulation.

Particular emphasis is put on the state of the University and tracing its place in society from the Enlightenment forward. Keep in mind it was published in 1987, but I find it chillingly accurate in describing 2015.

Though my background in Philosophy certainly aided some of this reading, I believe the book is widely accessible, and thoroughly engrossing to those who penetrate it even slightly.

Anyway, this from a man who hasn't completed reading a book in over a decade...

I first read this book as a bestseller many years ago. Since that initial reading it has remained at the front of my bookshelf and affected my evaluation of current events profoundly ever since.
Upon graduating from college in the late 70's I kept asking myself is this truly "IT"; the college experience? Was THAT experience intellectual rigor and pursuit of ideas? I quickly concluded that it was not! I felt conformity of thought was the goal of most professors and open consideration of other ideas clearly unwelcome and erroneous.
The straight jacket of thought has only been tightened over the decades since its publication, and I have been immensely comforted by Bloom's powerful arguments confirming that the funneling of thought in the modern age is very real. As free thinking people our institutions have entrenched narrow mindenness and silenced entire groups of creative, innovative, brilliant minds.

Philosophy professor Bloom points out that the one virtue in America these days seems to be openness to anything and everything as equally valid behaviours or point of view. Any and every opinion is greeted with equal tolerance - not conviction, but tolerance. It would be unacceptable dogmatism in most circles today to say that truth exists. That would mean that those who did not accept it would be wrong - and no one must be wrong. Dr Bloom shows that we have become so open to everything that our minds have been closed to the idea that something may indeed be true and something else false. The closing of the American mind through openness to everything! That is exactly what is happening in the post-rational era that has overtaken our universities and seminaries and the thinking of many church leaders.
He criticizes this behaviour of randomness in beliefs and convictions because it will lead to a gradual dissolution of all virtues that kept the society together. His message is, that the American society should urgently find back to its roots before it is too late.
It cannot be denied that he sees in feminism a helper for the closing of the American mind.. He says that feminism favors equality over freedom. "Its goals are so unlimited and constrained that it ends as do many modern social movements that want abstract justice, in forgetting nature and using force to refashion human beings to secure that justice."
As utopians and advocates of state intervention to eradicate what they see as "inequality" produced by "male oppression", feminists show a remarkable affinity to Marxism and socialism. Another aspect would be the attention given to Eastern mysticism, pagan beliefs and New Ageism

The Closing of the American Mind is a powerful, formidably intelligent book that sweeps across the state of humanities in modern education. It is marred, in places, however, by the author's prejudices and blind spots.

Bellow, great ally and friend of Bloom's at the University of Chicago kicks off with the intro, a rallying cry for the noble old humanities subjects, the 'submerged Atlantis' of a great books education. The value of such an education is to cultivate the higher mental life. Of course, Bellow was obsessed by this notion throughout his writing life. This culminated in the masterful 'Herzog', the story of a man who has nurtured the higher philosophical questions to an extreme yet has no clue how to master or even cope with the practicalities of modern life and is bankrupt and broken by the end.

Bloom himself was a formidable scholar, the inspiration for the character of Ravelstein in Bellow's final novel. A larger than life intellect, he was firmly of the view that reading Plato and Shakespeare is the most valuable thing you can do with your life. Far more useful and noble than studying MBAs, or how to reform the health service, or the natural sciences. No, the real ultimate education is philosophy - freewheeling, old style philosophy from Socrates, through Plato, through Aristotle and on to the Renaissance - Locke, Rousseau: the enlightenment, and modern democracy. Do students today appreciate all this? The hell they do! Modern life is a cultural desert, based on the notorious 'reforms' of the 60s when liberalization of university life destroyed much of what was good about education and turned it into a flaccid grab bag where you studied subjects that could be harnessed to useful ends, plus the odd paper that took your fancy.

Bloom's analysis is much deeper than this however and some of his specific diatribes are amongst the most powerful and funny parts of the book. Take music - rock music is all noise, not a patch on the noble constructions of Beethoven. Love - pah! The youth of today have no idea how to love, they haven't the chops for it, all they do is mope around whining about 'commitment' and 'relationships'. Actually, Bloom says very sound things about these 'lifestyles', not human lives worthy of the name. But his diagnosis is bizarre. He seems to think Woody Allen is responsible for a lot of this with his films just variations on what it is like to have no self (Zelig the worst culprit). C'mon Allan - surely you can see that the other Allen is fundamentally a humourist, not a philosopher, as he has reluctantly acknowledged himself. If you think Woody Allen is indicative of all that is wrong with modern life you have a pretty skewed view of things.

Still, delve deeply into this book, give it your concerted attention for a few weeks, and it will burrow deep into your marrow. Certainly Bloom makes a powerful case for reigniting the flame of philosophy in the Socratic sense in American Universities so students can discover the highest friendship and shared great moments, debating the ultimate questions through deep reading of the great philosophers that will last their whole lives.

I studied philosophy and politics myself at university, and it is true that the books that stuck with me the most were the great texts. The deep humanistic education that is vital to the cultivation of the soul, and the asking of that ultimate and most fundamental of questions - what is life for?

How many people these days would give you the glib answer of: '42'? And that is Bloom's point.

Over 20 years old and eerily prescient. Much of the decay of the Enlightenment ideal that Bloom analyzed decades ago has accelerated since the publication of this work. An interesting indictment of the intellectual vapidity of modern institutions. But more so, a great study for the lay person of just how the various strains of philosophy that have developed throughout the ages are relevant to *today's* political society.

In this, "The Closing of the American Mind" is very similar to Popper's "The Open Society and its Enemies Vols I & II" (Plato, Hegel), Francis Fukayama's "The End of History and the Last Man" (Hegel, Kojeve) and as well, Stephen Hicks' "Explaining Post-Modernism" (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel.)

Bloom cogently describes how the forces of the Counter-Enlightenment have clashed, and ultimately prevailed over the Enlightenment and that most iconic of Enlightenment institutions, the university, during the latter half of the 20th century. His explanation of the "Nietzche-ization of the Left" is brilliant, showing how, even though he is commonly thought of as a philosopher of the Right, as a full fledged enemy of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche's philosophy neatly dovetailed with that of the Left and allowed the Left to co-opt his thought.

This is an extremely important book. Well worth the read for anyone who is interested in why it is important for liberalism and the Enlightenment to ultimately prevail in its battle with its enemies - if we wish to continue the great American experiment that has so benefited all of humanity.

The university is supposed to be the place where excited young minds come to be initiated into the mysteries of the cosmos. And it wasn't long ago that such adventures were both available and pursued. Liberal education encouraged students to ask for themselves the question "what is man?" and to wrestle with alternative answers. The university provided a haven where the easy and preferred answers of the culture could be safely set aside, at least for a time, while the great minds of history past were consulted, argued with, and learned from.

But in Bloom's thirty years as a university professor he has witnessed a change, both in the mood and expectation of the students, and in the university's sense of identity, which has fragmented into a smorgasbord of unrelated pursuits. Confusion over the nature of knowledge confounds both. The spirit of the age, relativism, the truth that there is no objective truth, has settled like a smog over the campuses. Students no longer expect to find truth and meaning "out there", but only within. So the appeal of liberal arts to students is vastly diminished if it is denied that these studies can point to any reality beyond themselves.

Bloom notes that "the university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. There is no vision...of what an educated human being is. The student gets no intimation that great mysteries might be revealed to him, that new and higher motives of action might be discovered within him, that a different and more human way of life can be harmoniously constructed by what he is going to learn." The "undecided student is an embarrassment to most universities, because he seems to be saying, 'I am a whole human being. Help me to form myself in my wholeness and let me develop my real potential,' and he is the one to whom they have nothing to say" (p.339).

America was founded on the Enlightenment tradition of men like Locke where reason was central; equality and human rights were rationally derived, universal principles, and democracy could flourish. A competing political philosophy with its origins in Rousseau but more radically developed by Nietzsche is where Bloom sees the beginning of today's predicament. It was with Nietzsche that American intellectuals in the forties became enamoured. Nietzsche denied, however, the rationally accessible human rights and equality that was central to American ideals. Rather it was in localized "culture" that man finds his wholeness and identity. In fact this meant that there was no such thing as "man" in the singular; there are as many kinds of "man" as there are cultures. The objective tool of reason is replaced by the subjective one of "commitment" and acts of the will.

American intellectuals did not seem to see the darker side of Nietzsche. He himself recognized that his cultural relativism meant "war and great cruelty rather than great compassion" (p.202). "Whether this value relativism is harmonious with democracy was a question that was dealt with by never being raised" (p.152). In fact, there can't be a respect for both human rights and culture "because a culture itself generates its own way of life and principles...with no authority above it" (p.192). Bloom warns that we need to "credit the possibility that the overpowering visions of German philosophers are preparing the tyranny of the future" (p.240).

Since the sixties, the vocabulary of Nietzschean ideas has been adopted at a superficial level by Americans such that they are no more than slogans (eg. words like "values" and "creativity"). Students do not and are not required to think them through. It's not even the embrace of relativism that Bloom finds to be the biggest problem, but the unthinking dogmatism with which it is held. This results, then, in the closing of the American mind when young people believe that there are no thoughts worth considering that they do not already know, no visions of the human experience worth exploring that they do not already possess.

The denial of any universals means that there is only the particular. If there is no such thing as "man" but only the "self" then what does Aristotle have to say to me? If reason is less important than feeling why should I care about what Plato says about justice? No wonder today's students are more concerned with self-fulfillment than with becoming wise.

So how are students to get excited again by the mysteries and possibilities of human experience? Bloom sees as the best solution the old Great Books approach, where the classics are read as the authors intended them to be read. This is no small difference from the typical approach in the humanities, where the classics are now kept. There they are treated as mummified museum pieces and read through the lens of modern presuppositions and political correctness. It is as if a great sign hangs over the door to the humanities that says "There is no truth, at least not here."

For example, it is claimed that Aristotle's "Ethics" teaches us not what a good man is but what the Greeks thought about morality. If it was read as it was intended to be read, students would be challenged to discover new experiences and reassess old ones. However now they are told that Aristotle can just be used to enrich the vision of the world they already have. Bloom is not saying that the claims of the great books are automatically true, but that we ought to wrestle with them in order to see that the picture of the whole may well be larger than the one we currently have.

Though he has argued that free inquiry and democracy itself are threatened when reason is devalued, Bloom is hopeful that liberal education is still possible. "The questions are all there. They only need to be addressed continuously and seriously for liberal learning to exist; for it does not consist so much in answers as in the permanent dialogue" (p.380).

This book, written more than 20 years ago, remains extremely relevant for today. The basic thesis of the book is that what happened in the 60s to the cultural and educational landscape (particularly in the universities) and has since then gathered pace, has undermined the foundations of American civilisation (and I would add Western Civilisation). But what is the problem. For Bloom it is the ideology of relativism - where there were once share values and mores, the only thing now shared by all is that "there is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. But when there are no shared goals or visions of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?" Writing here from the UK, it is astonishing how successful the new ideology has been; thus here in the UK, all the major political parties (including the conservatives) buy into the ideology of the primacy of the individual's right to be whatever wants to be. Thus, all parties advance the most flaky notions of what the basic foundation stones of society are - the most obvious one is that the family has become well just whatever you want it to be, constituted by whoever, whether transient or permanent, who cares: lets call it family if the participants wish it to be so called. This is an excellent book and one wonders what additional barbs Bloom would have to make about the state of the culture more than 20 years. No doubt he would be as entertaining as ever.

What Bloom is really almost angry about is that the new relativism embracing an openness to all things inevitably leads to what the ancients called acidie - a kind of spiritual indifference to life or what Bloom refers to as listlessness or a deformity of the spirit. If all things have the same value, why seek and search for truth - why seek to live a virtuous life, why seek to learn from the wisdom of the ancients, Socrates, Plato, Artistotle, Aquinas etc - all those who have contributed so much to our understanding of what it means to be a human being. By contrast, for Bloom, "True openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present". What Bloom is getting at is the danger of a basic ideology which makes us crassly indifferent to the grandeur of being. And Bloom says something that will get people's hackles up: "Prejudices, strong prejudices, are visions about the way things are...The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty." But, the curious thing is that no one including our relativist political leaders really has no values. Thus, here in the UK, "tolerance" for all types of lifestyles has become the Great Value - it literally towers everything - thus a UK minister tells catholic schools that it must now give information about abortion facilities and their access and should provide information about sexual lifestyles in a non-judgemental value. But where is the philosophical basis for making this so called "tolerance" an overarching value? As Bloom notes "It is not the immortality of relativism that I find appalling. What is astonishing and degrading is the dogmatism with which we accept relativism, and our easygoing lack of concern about what that means for our lives".

Bloom's canvas is a large one - not just education but practically every foundation stone of life is examined, noting that "The dreariness of the family's spiritual landscape passes belief". But Bloom's primary focus is undoubtedly education. He notes that "the failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is" and "deprived of literary guidance, students no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even image that is such a thing". . But for Bloom: "the substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for"

I noted his comments on music with interest but did not feel he had much to contribute.

Bloom's most pointed comments are on eros and relationships, noting that "Students these days are pleasant, friendly, and if not great souled, at least not particularly mean-spirited. Their primary preoccupation is themselves, understood in the narrowest sense" - he notes later: that they are "flat-souled". He notes that students "can be anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason to want to be anything in particular". He notes that as sex has become "no big deal", it has also become passionless, trivialised, de-eroticised and demystified, leading to a "crippled eros". He laments the loss of modesty. But the key issue is provisionality in sexual relationships: "To strangers from another planet, what would be the most striking thing is that sexual passion no longer includes the illusion of eternity" and a young person "can now choose, but he finds he no longer has a sufficient motive for choice that is more than whim, that is binding". But Bloom is not just interested in the deterioration in sexual relationships but he notes the loss of symbolism for fathers: "There is nothing left of the reverence towards the father as the symbol of the divine on earth, the unquestioned bearer of authority". And Bloom notes the wreakage created by divorce: "The important lesson that the family taught was the existence of the only unbreakable bond, for better or for worse, between human beings". But, also the impetus for marriage has disappeared as men have their cake and eat it.

I am not at all qualified to give an opinion on his philosophical analysis of what is the causation of all this, particularly his analysis that the importation of German philosophy into a culture ill-suited to digest and understand it is the principal cause but I did find his comments on Locke and Rousseau to be both interesting and entertaining. But, I feel that he is right when he says "the novel aspect of the crisis of the West is that it is identical with a crisis of philosophy".

Bloom takes a big swipe at the ideology of "the self": "To sum up, the self is the modern substitute for the soul". He notes that "America has no-fault automobile accidents, no-fault divroces, and it is moving with the aid of modern philosophy towards no fault choice". But the so called "life-style" choice comes in for his greatest criticism: "lifestyle is so much freer, easier, more authentic and democratic. No attention ahs to be paid to content". Thus the word "lifestyle" becomes the democratic abstraction for justifying all sorts of hedonistic behaviour.

Democracy comes in for criticism and in this respect Bloom echoes CS Lewis. Democracy "causes a particular bent which, if not actively corrected, distorts the mind's vision" and "The deepest intellectual weakness of democracy is the lack of taste or gift for the theoretical life". He notes the use of "slogans" and the chasing after the "shiny new theory".

Bloom the reminds us of the fear of death and the relation to eternity and notes man's grandeur: "Man is the particular being that can know the universal, the temporal being that is aware of eternity, the part that can survey the whole, the effect that seeks the cause".

The sixties come in for particular attack, One comment I found most interesting was his noting that sacrificial morality "was not the morality that came into vogue in the sixties, which was an altogether more histrionic version of moral conduct". I was reminded of the attacks on Pope Pius XII which began in the sixties and continue unabated to this day. The fact that under Pope Pius XII's leadership, the Catholic Church managed to save about 800,000 Jews is regarded as not significant - rather Pope Pius XII is derided and regarded as shameful for not attacking Hitler and his regime publically from the balcony of St Peter's i.e. Pope Pius XII did not engage in moral histrionics, ergo he is not moral!

The University, as an institution, comes in for the greatest criticism - he deals with so many issues, grade inflation, the fragmentation of philosophy departments into specialism, preferences for certain sections of the community but generally one gets the impression that philosophers in universities no longer believe in living the Socratic examined life or at least have no passion for it.

I have always been a misanthrope, critical of the great unwashed masses with the same disparaging attitude as, say, Edmund Wilson. But now I have real fodder for my criticsm. Alan Bloom says we don't read and have lost our way culturally speaking.
I checked up on what he says about education in Europe. He says the Italians still read Machievelli and Dante and the French read Rosseau, Descartes, and Pascal. But the dim-witted American's don't hardly even read the Bible anymore--this is the one book that we all use to read. So it gave us a common place from which to draw fables and other lessons to guide us in our lives.
The discussion of the history of political philosophy from Aristotle to Hegel was difficult to understand. Not because it was poorly written--this stuff is just difficult to understand period. But having read it I understand somewhat that the German thinkers have postulated ideas that we all now take for granted. In other words, the thinkers in their ivory towers do really impact the course of our lives so we should pay attention.
Anyway, Alan Bloom has made we want to go back and read Aristotle et al. In higschool English all I did was leer at the blond across the room. I realize now that I did have a poor education when compared with my Europeans counterparts. But you might argue that those folks over there no longer dominate the culture. That is true but I would prefer an aestethic culture to the television culture that is endemic to our McDonald's American culture. I for one will not let my mind close up with the rest.
I read Ravelstein as well which is a must companion to "The Closing of the American Mind"

Allan Bloom has a soul, which sets him apart from most of the posers who teach in our universities and regularly commend each other for their "compassion" and "open-mindedness". I went into university with a generally good disposition towards school and learning---I came out disillusioned with professors who have a lot of surface compassion but nothing to show underneath (in strong intellect or hearts), and believe me I tried to find it because I wanted to find it. I wanted to believe after my baptism into the college "culture" that they had something more to tell me than "everything's relative, even though we're sure that tradition, Christianity, and men are evil." Well, they dressed their lectures up with vague PC-watchwords and complex (didactic) explanations, but it all boiled down to fatally flawed philosophies, what Bloom illuminates in this book. I only wish I'd read it BEFORE I went to university, I might have laughed my way through classes rather than search for a beating heart beneath the veneer of academia. I thank God (oops!) that I had a few truly open-minded professors who encouraged or at least entertained opinions against the prevailing university thought. I am now a happy graduate thanks to those brave souls, as Mr. Bloom's students give him similar thanks for making the age-old questions exciting and *consequential* in their lives.

Allan Bloom’s description of the self-complacent philistinism of American students is both insightful and entertaining, and is as relevant today as it was in 1987. Bloom is surely right to condemn the superficial and philistine aspects of contemporary academic thought. He berates the sort of value relativism which advises students to seek self-contented “life-styles” rather than good and noble lives (p. 144). He berates the sort of cultural relativism which is unwilling to acknowledge the superiority of a contemplative culture—a culture in which the good is not automatically presumed to be identical with its own customs—over an uncritical, dogmatic culture (p. 36). And he berates the trivialized psychology that lauds creativity without making any distinction between the creativity of a Raphael and that of a finger painter. (p. 199)

I find one striking flaw in Bloom’s account, however. When Bloom describes certain important thinkers of the past, thinkers who are intimately related to the present cultural predicament, he often uncritically accepts the very interpretation of these thinkers that has led to our decline. He seems to have neglected to consider the possibility that our present predicament could be the result not of certain canonical works but of a misinterpretation of them.

This flaw becomes particularly apparent in Bloom’s account of Nietzsche, which I will describe in some detail.

Bloom claims that Nietzsche “surveyed and summed up the contradictory strands of modern thought and concluded that victorious rationalism is unable to rule in culture or soul, that it cannot defend itself theoretically and that its human consequences are intolerable.” (p. 196) But in fact Nietzsche’s conclusion is the very opposite. Nietzsche demands not merely that we tolerate the victory of reason over God, but that we enthusiastically welcome this victory, that we even celebrate it. Nietzsche demands that we develop and maintain the prodigious courage required to face the full consequences of reason, that we cultivate a vitality that embraces the godless, groundless world and loves it in spite of its groundlessness. Bloom contends that for Nietzsche there is “an inner necessity for us to abandon reason on rational grounds.” (p. 197) This is also a misinterpretation. What Nietzsche seeks to prescribe and to practice is not an abandonment of reason, but rather the adoption of a more enlightened form of reason—a psychologically and aesthetically aware form of reason that is cognizant of its origins in passion and custom—a form of reason that seeks to transcend limitations, not by denying that it has limitations, but by finding real and enduring solutions for them—a form of reason that takes into account aesthetic considerations rather than banishing these into a separate “artistic” realm—a form of reason that recognizes the Apollonian as well as the Dionysian aspects of intellectual life. The sort of reason Nietzsche does indeed disavow is that of the psychologically naïve Kant, who, rather than giving a genuine critique of morality and uncovering its problematic nature, sought merely to rationalize the sort of morality that felt psychologically comfortable to him, the sort of morality he had learned in childhood.

Bloom tells us that any evaluation of cultures as “higher” and “lower” must imply some absolute standard and thus deny the very premise of cultural relativism. (p. 192) But , just a few pages alter, Bloom goes on to characterize Nietzsche as a cultural relativist. (p.202) Is Bloom then unaware of Nietzsche’s frequent and passionate statements denouncing some cultures and praising others? Or is he deliberately disregarding them?

Of course Nietzsche is notorious for contradicting himself as he gets carried away with polemical fervor, so it is very easy to misinterpret him, but still one gets the impression that Bloom has read a lot of secondary literature about Nietzsche, which describes his role in the history of ideas in a certain way, and used these descriptions rather than Nietzsche’s work as the basis of his polemic.

Bloom’s views on rock music are also dubious. He claims that “Rock music encourages passions and provides models that have no relation to any life the young people who go to universities can possibly lead.” (p. 80) In other words, it provides passions and models that are utopian, and unrelated to the bourgeois life for which students are destined. But is not rock music, by virtue of this very fact, similar to other utopian works—similar to Plato’s Republic, one of Bloom’s icons? Why then does Bloom laud Plato and denigrate rock music?

Bloom claims that rock music “provides premature ecstasy and … artificially induces the exaltation naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors.” (p. 80) He is concerned that, since students listen to rock music in their youth, “the pleasure they experienced in the beginning was so intense that they no longer look for it at the end, or as the end.” (p. 80) But why does the early production of ecstasy preclude rather than inspire its later production? Listening to recordings of Beethoven produces an ecstasy and elevation of the soul without the effort that would be required to actually perform the music. According to Bloom’s reasoning this should cause those who are exposed early in life to Beethoven to later become musical Philistines, while the opposite is true in fact.

Bloom also complains that rock music is so loud as to make conversation impossible, “so that much of friendship must be without the shared speech that Aristotle asserts is the essence of friendship.” (p. 75) Conversation is replaced by “illusions of shared feelings … which are supposed to contain so much meaning beyond speech.” (p. 75) But the same could be said of the best classical music, which also precludes conversation by demanding our full attention. Listening to music with a friend in itself inspires feelings that are shared between us, or at least feelings which share their origin in the music.

The late Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" was an unexpected bestseller when it appeared in 1987. It is an outstanding work combining polemic against the diminution of American standards with serious thought about how we came to this impasse. Bloom's book is a testament to the power of ideas.
If "The Closing of the American Mind" captures Bloom's thought, his friend Saul Bellow's novel, "Ravelstein" (1996) captures much of Bloom the man. I think Bloom's book and Bellow's novel will be permanently intertwined in the history of American thought and literature. It is difficult to think of one without reflecting on the other.
The themes of Professor Bloom's study are stated in its title and, more explicitly, in the subtitle of the book: "How Higher Education has failed Democracy and Impoverished the Soul's of Today's Students." I tried to capture these themes in the title of this review: Education, Democracy, and Soul.
The first theme of the book is education. Professor Bloom argues that American higher education has lost its sense of purpose and direction. He finds this due to an emphasis on relativism and toleration and a reluctance to focus on questions of purpose and meaning. Similarly, Professor Bloom finds American education has become overly politicized and attuned to the concerns of the moment. He urges that liberal education return to its initial function of searching for wisdom and for self-knowledge. While not every student need pursue the liberal arts (in fact, it is a rare enterprise), Bloom finds that these studies must be available for those interested, and honored, if University education is to produce thoughtful human beings and an informed community holding values and the pursuit of truth in common. Bloom finds the source of liberal studies in ancient Greece with Socrates and his great student, Plato.
The second theme of the book is democracy, and American constitutionalism. American democracy remains a precious experiment and Bloom traces its roots to enlightenment thought, particularly in John Locke. The basic values of our system are liberty and equality. Bloom ties democratic values into a society devoted to the pursuit of empirical knowledge rather than superstition. He returns frequently in his book to Alexis de Touqueville's "Democracy and America" which captured a great deal of the promise of our country while warning of the levelling and conformity that would result from an unchecked, uncritical approach to a sociey in which each person's opinions counted as much as each other person's. There is much fascinating but difficult material in this book about German anti-rationalists beginning with Nietzsche and proceeding through Max Weber and Heidegger. These thinkers espoused theories, Bloom argues, fundamentally at odds with American democracy. Their theories have been vulgarized and watered-down and form the basis, Bloom argues, for the preoccupations of modern America with "life-styles" and "commitments" rather than reason. Bloom's historical discussions are difficult and move rather too quickly at times, but they are thoughtful and rewarding.
The third theme of the book is soul. For Bloom, soul is what our young people and our country are in danger of losing. Soul is at first blush exemplified by the Socratic pursuit. It is a conviction that some things are worth knowing and pursuing and it is an attempt to find them through serious enterprise. Soul is a matter of love, passion and effort. Bloom finds "soul" compromised by an attitude of relativism, of too easy commitments, and of a desire to compromise somewhat too easily in matters of love to attain the necessity of sex. Lack of soul, for Bloom, is exemplified in the pursuit of rock music by the young and not-so-young as an attempt to find an emotional high without the attendant spiritual and intellectual effort.
This book is difficult reading and there are moments when the polemics get in the way of the thought. This notwitstanding, the book is a passionate and deeply informed treatment of the life of the mind and sprit.

The Closing of the American Mind is a famous book amongst certain circles, and I read it because I was aware of its notoriety. Here's the skinny: it is a page-turner for about the first half...and then Bloom gets REAL pedantic, REAL quick.

I wanted more of a focused, consistent historical overview of how the American universities got into the state they were in by 1986 (when the book was written). Bloom, however, dithers a LOT, and devolves from readability into philosophical "weightiness." It's intellectual showboating at its worst and indicates to me that Bloom felt he needed to establish his bona fides with the people who'd be reading (and critiquing) this book, viz. other university professors.

So be it...there is still some value to be mined, and some GREAT turns of phrase (e.g. "conspicuous compassion"). Of course, anyone who's ever been to college already knows exactly what the score is: the vast, vast majority of students are there to drink alcohol, smoke pot, have casual sex, and get the degree in order to enhance their job prospects. The university experience is about having youthful fun and making oneself a more valuable commodity to an eventual--and inevitable--employer. Students are NOT there to philosophize a la Plato, Aristotle, et al. They aren't there to ask the big fundamental questions.

Bloom bemoans what the university has become, but doesn't have any prescriptive solutions. It's all a farce. The students don't want to learn, and the professors know that. The professors themselves are in conflict, divided by discipline...the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, all eyeing one another suspiciously, locked into trench warfare, with no overarching cohesion.

But no matter how ludicrous the modern university is--and it can get UNBELIEVABLY ludicrous in the humanities departments--young people have had it drilled into them that they NEED THAT DEGREE. And so they get it...and are thousands of dollars in debt once they graduate and start looking for work. (What a great way to produce complacent, easily cowed employees...)

It's a scandal...

Anyway, this book will have you nodding at times (in both the positive and negative senses), and you should take something from it. Bloom has some interesting things to say--albeit sporadically sprinkled throughout four hundred pages...

I couldn't overstate its importance. In a country devoted to rooting out and ridiculing elitists, or the educated, <I>American Mind</I> should not exist, particularly in a form that doesn't pander to ninth-grade comprehension.
As a person who entered college vaguely hoping for some key to civilization that would change the course of my life, and who encountered nothing, I spent the next decade searching for something of this magnitude to affirm I was cheated. Yes, but Bloom posits an alternative to our thin, thin soil and the thin people that live on it, and offers a compelling glimpse of the minds that created us. Us, the world's most ahistorical and self-absorbed people, fulfilling a theoretical experiment of near-cosmic proportion? Even an American savage such as myself, one-dimensional but infected with longing, can build on these stones and find her way out, or so I believe.
If you have a mind and an interior life, you've spent your life seeking this book.

This is an all time favourite and really did change my outlook when I read it along time ago. I had these hunches implicitly, especially after graduate school, and reading another great one "The Inarticulate Society" by Tom Schachtman.

Today, I see the outcomes of this closed mind in our highest ranking universities when so many of my peers and colleagues can't describe how the three branches of government work, what was the essential conflict between Socrates and Callicles that defined our civilization, and what the difference is between protected free speech, and speech to incite violence or hate. We see this closed mind playing out in our public space, and the voters don't have the vocabulary to demand something otherwise.

It was great to be validated by such a great thinker. Not sure how to get out of this one though!!! I think time and ashes are the only way to heal.

What I mean by 'prophetic' is that the dilemma Bloom discusses in this book is becoming more and more widespread, and it is mapping the future of this country; a dim future indeed.

Like it or not, the majority of society allows the 'intelligentsia' do its thinking. That's a real shame, but so long as it is so, the 'intelligentsia' ought to be at least guiding the masses toward right, rational thought processes. This isn't the case today; western culture has traded truth for inclusivism, and it's going to cost us in the long run. My experience validated Bloom's observations and concerns, both in the schools I've attended and in the relationships I've had with students and graduates from other schools. Anyone who recognizes this phenomenon and would like to understand why it's bad would do well to read this book.

Bloom outlines a very honest look at the decay of society through the view of an educator towards his student body. "The Closing of the American Mind" is a well written presentation on the social and societal change of America and Americans since the foundation of the Republic. Similarly to Canada, the emphasis was on individuality, freedom and common cultural norms, values and traits which produced the most free, productive and truly progressive nation this Earth has ever, and probably will ever, see. Bloom outlines how the students and peoples minds "progress" to accept a perverted sense of "equality" over that of Freedom. How American culture, which had been founded on a mixture of older European cultures collectively centered on common religious precepts and guided by the truly Biblical set of Foundational Legal constructs: The U.S. Constitution which ensured the nearest "equality" any people/society could achieve with keeping the individual Freedoms entirely prominent as one's Right.
Of course those that will attack this Bloom fellow as a "sexist", "racist", "intolerant" or "right wing conservative" are looking through very one sided mirror and not learned within their own ideological history. If one, for example, researches Socialist history; be it "international socialism": Communism, "National Socialism": Nazism or "State Socialism": Fascism the outcome is that all - "Left Wing" - thinking and schema is comprised through the planks outlined by Karl Marx within his Socialist Bible: The Communist Manifesto. The fact that all those seeking "Freedom" or "Equality" in the past through "Enlightenment" and "Humanity" all ended in the same ends: Dictatorship through Anarchy. Why? because the aforementioned socio-political ideologies are based on Academic, often molested, theory all the while disregarding any and all factual specificity that might disagree with one's hypothesis. This was most certain for Marx's "Das Kapital" and many others. I would suggest some reads to assist one in understanding Bloom's work a bit more clearly before delving into and embracing the chance of misunderstanding the fellow's thesis if one's not into socio-political philosophy. I'd suggest "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson, "The Great Deceit" by Zygmund Dobbs, "Fabian Freeway" by Rose Martin, "War Against the Family" by William Gairdner, "Dumbing Us Down" by John Taylor Gatto and of course "The Communist Manifesto" - by Karl Marx. To put the aforementioned into a more historical and factually based setting one might also research The Reece Committee Investigations of 1952 - "Foundations of Power and Influence" by Rene Wormser is worthy. A 4/5 for my rating simply due to the writing style of the Author. Happy Reading...

A major impact in my thinking and an awesome introduction to Nietzsche, nihilism and the American education system. Bloom outlines what education was compared to what it is today. How cultures consisted of much more than mere nationalism, but rather, educated thinkers who influenced Western civilization from non-equalitarian societies. Bloom relates thoughts from Alex de Toquville and the problem of equalitarianism, the deterioration of the American educational system and the problem of nihilism. In doing this, Bloom, outlines the teachings of Nietzsche, Max Weber, Marx and other major thinkers that have dealt with such issues.

Weber's charisma, to Marx's rationalism to Nietzsche's culture, self-positing and value creating ability, using Heidegger's term of "authenticity," Bloom delivers a book that is worth every page and chapter. His outline of the 1960's turmoil that aided to both the extension of nihilism and the deterioration of the University is essential reading. The MBA has replaced true educational and cultural reflection that molds, shapes and infuses interior authenticity in individuals that in turn, form our leaders, thinkers and greats of our time period. But where are they today? Certainly a much smaller and obscure group that is both surrounded and smothered by external, outer-direction that fails to produce those great thinkers that have literally changed the course of Western civilization.

Bloom also ventures into morality, music and general social conditions that affect our American civilization and most certainly his students and the University, once a "sacred" place of character development, now a place where the classics have been shelved in the humanities, rejected by the scientific champions, only to find students - the back bone of future thinkers - to obtain more superfluous knowledge determined solely for financial success and material gain; external accomplishments devoid of internal character authenticity and inner-directed value positing.

Bloom's book should be read by every educator. The University that seriously values the original intent of such educational institutions since their inception have lost sight of direction.

Those that blow this book off as conservative verses liberal miss the entire theme of Bloom's complaint and value of the great minds that form our entire society and civilization.

Now the paradox here is: I totally agree with Bloom's analysis on former American society as a book reading intelligent culture even especially among the youth subsequently transforming into a superficial consumer orientated mentality. And yet I strongly disagree with his negative assessment of the 1960's rebelliousness, which in my opinion, was a remarkable socialistic awaking of the youth and culture into insight above and beyond the controlling rhetoric and conditioning of the wealthy and powerful.

There are two significant points that I have received from this book:

1. That the original American culture has transformed from the authentic self capable of alternative thoughts based on individual rights to the protection of individual groups or subcultures - "whites," blacks" "feminists" & etc. Relativism has blurred the lines of distinction into the acceptance of all teachings, including those that contradict our most fundamental. Our individual "Lockean" rights, that is, the individual's ability to choose from alternative branches of thinking apart from the pressure of public opinion have descended into the pressure opinions of the "group" we associate ourselves with.

2. The most insidious and effective transformation of our most cherished values, that of "freedom," "democracy," "rights" and etc., do not have to be directly challenged to be assaulted. But rather, the linguistics do the work, that is, the words themselves remain as champions in the front line as ultimate American values, but subtly, without conscious awareness, the very meanings of the words have changed, and in some cases radically mutating to the polar opposites of their original intent.

A distiction must be made here between a brilliantly written book and a book who's message is important and appealing. I work to keep that distinction in mind, and Closing of the American Mind wins on both counts. Bloom appeals to us to make peace with the notion that good and evil are not the same thing; that all ways of acting and thinking are not made equal by our wishing them so.
He describes his observations among university students and tells us why he believes the growing American love affair with personal freedom and creativity is doomed to failure without its marriage to critical thinking and respect for the thousands of years of thought we tend to consider outdated today. This book touches some nerve which polarizes people strongly. I believe it challenges us to consider changing parts of us that we are used to considering safe, secure and comforting.

Going to grade school or high school in America can be problematic; but going to college is positively awful. Allan Bloom contends that the university - whose roots are in a tradition based on reason - has been undermined by its very faculty and students, who subscribe to a tradition based on feeling (ie. "if it feels good, do it").
Professor Bloom sets up the argument as follows: reason derives from the Greeks (Plato, Socrates and Aristotle); it was used by Locke and the Founders to promote republican ideals and thus becomes the foundation of our society. The University's role is to preserve the continuity of thought which brought about those ideals and, in so doing, enrich students' lives and lead them to think independently.
But the University has strayed from this role in order to tackle issues such as justice and equality, and in so doing, has embraced a line of thought derived from Marx and Nietzsche, which is directly opposed to the principles on which the republic and the University was founded.
This book takes a long time to read and an even longer time to fully understand. The argument is solid, bur problematic in places (if you're not a Straussian, you'll see why immediately). That's why, if you're short on time, just read part three, where Bloom covers the sixties and his personal experience with what has changed in the University since he started teaching. You'll be outraged and enlightened, and want to read the rest of the book.

I was surprised at how compelling the arguments of this book were-in part because I had dismissed it, when it first came out, as Reaganite conservative propaganda. As Saul Bellow chronicles in Ravelstien, a fictional account of Bloom in his dying days, Bloom's students, who often went on to positions in high places such as government, loved him. Well, this book is conservative in a way but don't confuse it with Pat Buchanan's ravings or shouting yuppies in bars: Bloom's book is a masterful interpretation of Plato's emphasis on three ideals key to ancient Greece and the greatness of America: the good, the beautiful, and the true. As illustrated by the woman who stands up in the subterranean feminist meeting in Fellini's City of Women that all women are beautiful, all women are young, all women are twenty years old-it is simply wishful thinking-and ultimately deeply character-debilitating self-deception, if not a Naziesque form of thought control-to persuade oneself (or try to convince others) that everyone and everything is equally beautiful, good, or true. The greatness of the United States, Bloom points out eloquently and repeatedly, is that we have inherited and (at least in our earlier days) instantiated these Greek ideal of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Part of what has confused us as a nation is our other great inheritance of ideals, from France of the French revolution. Here the ideals were liberty, fraternity, and equality. Kurt Vonnegut has a wonderful short story where, to make all citizens equal, people who are significantly smarter are brought into line with special helmets than bang on their head continuously so they can't think straight-a fictional example, exaggerated for clarity, of all that is wrong with the enforcement of diversity for diversity's sake, political correctness, and what another Bloom (Harold) calls "the politics of resentment." Allan Bloom shows that what is superior about the United States as a nation devolves upon its integration of the Greek ideals-not to accept all cultures as equal, but to scour them, taking what is best from all. He gives the example of the pre-colonial British practise in India of burning wives of the deceased husband (similar practises have existed in Japan-floating widows down the river-and elsewhere). Not all cultural practises are equally good. For example, women are treated better in countries like Turkey and the United States than in places like Saudi Arabia and Japan. That doesn't mean, however, that Alice Walker is Shakespeare. Although this book does not negate deconstruction or cultural relativism (to be used for purposes of comparison, not mere levelling) it shows the strength of a once-great country that has lost sight of the ideals of excellence articulated in the Platonic search for the true, the beautiful, and the good. There are, of course, other interpretations of Platonism. But this book is a hard-hitting tour-de-force, a great example of applied Platonism, showin-good-heartedly and amusingly-not only what is wrong with America but what needs to be done to fix it. An eloquent defense of the dying core of western civilization.

Bloom has the incredible knack of making you go "No that's just wrong." Some of the things he says are just incorrect. It seems like he has been living in a cave since 1944, the way he sneers at social movements and popular culture. A new reader is drawn to the conclusion that Allan Bloom is motivated by his own unexamined prejudices. He is bigoted and sheltered from the storm of real existence. His ideas on divorce and the children of divorce, for example, smack of a callous, cool detachment and a 'Holier than thou' Papal impracticality. "Who the hell does he think he is?" He may have a degree and great scholastic abilities, but when it comes to the human touch, or psychological insight, he is at best a charlatan. At worst, Allan Bloom is a fool duped into the laziness of only believing in the gravely limited dead old texts that he earned his fat professorial salary from, instead of opening his bald brain to today's brightest discoveries. Nevertheless, what makes this book so vital, almost 15 years since it was first published, is that there comes a second "No!" This "NO" is more powerful then the first wave of consternation and comical exasperation. This "NO" is intensely private and creeps up on you at the most harrowing of moments. IT says "No! HE RIGHT! YOU WRONG!" This is the legacy of a great writer and great thinker. I have found the same effect in the words of Rousseau, Nietszche, even someone as superficially vulgar as William S. Burroughs. These types of writers deserve respect because they prove that language and exposure to it by human beings is the only essential demand of a free society. Being open to the truth of things does not require a particular type of citizen or type of education, it is open to all in their own innocence. I encourage readers to discover this incredible book again.

While Professor Bloom's study is now over ten years old, the issues and subjects on which he holds forth are, as he shows, essentially timeless and transcend our views on past ages. While some have commented that Professor Bloom's analysis of texts is less than original, he himself states that he is an interloper in a great debate that has occurred over the centuries between philosophers. This is not a system a la John Rawls or a technical treatise, nor does Professor Bloom have an all-encompassing cure for our maladies. What he does do is put into focus our time and its complexities with clarity-this being harder to do than some would like to admit. Yes, the book is iconoclastic, and yes, it is controversial to some who become comfortable disregarding all the thinkers who came before them as stodgy, obsolete products that our wonderous social and natural sciences have eclipsed (or who simply cannot digest them for fear of having their conclusions challenged). Professor Bloom simply intends to shake up our lax sensibilities and show us that the debate on life (especially love and death, more greatly connected to politics than many care to admit) and its possibilities isn't quite as finished as we would have it. He is certainly not mainstream in our definition, but only is so because we have forgotten what it takes to long for anything in our self-satisfied stupor. The ideas raised in the book and the debates these bring about are what one used to go to the university for, before they became technical training grounds. Anyone not lying to themselves and having been through it should at the very least recognize this. Professor Bloom wonders what has happened to the longing in our souls (as did Nietzsche, but with different conclusions) that has driven mankind to greater and greater levels of civilization-and as one reads on, one realizes that his quest is our quest, even if we have turned our faces from it.

As a college student in the mid eighties I rarely felt at home with my fellow students. Bloom does an admirable job of explaining the cultural vacancy of the MTV generation, and isn't afraid to skewer sacred cows on the left and the right in his quest for answers. This book was embraced by a number of talking heads on the right, and I can't help but wonder if they read it all the way through. While Bloom correctly implicates the leftist ideology of 'liberation' in the erosion of intellectual standards and all around American aesthetic sensibility, he also points out the irony of a 'conservative' movement that holds as one of its heroes America's first divorced president. The only major flaw in his analysis is his underestimation of the responsibilty that mass media, "television", holds.

This was the most difficult fun and knowledge seeking free time reading I have done in years. At times Dr. Bloom was speaking to me, freely articulating my own disappointment with the academy. His comments about the free fall of traditional inquiry and the current status of the social sciences and humanities was piercing. Since I was born in the 50s, the transformations he spoke of that became so apparent to him in the 80s were experienced in the public school and university careers of those of us born in the first decade or so after WWII.

In spite of the delight in reading Dr. Bloom's astute observations of those years, in no time, the next pages would lose and confuse me, forcing a re-read and consultation of other sources. Ironically, this exemplified the point he was making since those areas had to do with philosophy. (Plato is next.) Nonetheless, this is a marvelous work of incredible intellectual depth by a very scholarly man who was aware, and somewhat saddened, by the trends of his times.

The book is long, requires real dedication, but in my opinion it was well worth the read. The first two thirds of the book seem as if they are not related to one another, but then, by the last part, especially the chapter The Sixties, all the detail about the German School, Marcuse, Plato, converge. Although the 60s seemed groundbreaking and exciting to the youth of its time (including me), Bloom ventures to state, quite convincingly, that it was void of intellectual gravitas due a highly stylized, yet simplistic view of its philosophical and historical context.

Dr. Bloom also greatly delves into the role of the university and his founded fears of the compromise of the special status of inquiry in the academy being wedded to popular culture and politics. He repeatedly asserts that there's a lack of support, in his experience even among some professors, to uphold the bigger questions of existence, philosophy, religion, science, culture - what have you - that transcend popular culture and politics.

On the topic of politics, one might be tempted to state that Dr. Bloom took sides, and that his opus has left-right implications. It may have appeared a bit critical of what is commonly thought of as the left, but the notion of being "progressive", of throwing off tradition, of being less discriminate about what is good or evil, ugly or beautiful, right or wrong, tends to be the territory of the modern left. I never felt he was simply being opinionated, but that he just attributed his assessment of the late 20th century academia to certain movements and philosophies that permeated many areas of the university. Dr. Bloom greatly laments what the university has become because he clearly loved the institution and believed it was indispensable to the knowledge and mysteries of mankind.

The Closing of the American Mind was a unique book for me, in that it showed me why I felt a lack of education after graduating from college. It was one of those books that made me want to read more books, which I hope is the goal of every good educator. I was struck by the way Bloom described a lot of everyday realities with new eyes, and although there were a lot of things I didn't understand in the course of reading this book, I found he was right about most. He helped me understand why things are the way they are today. Covering several thousand years of philosophy and culture is ambitious, to say the least, but I found the digressions informative and interesting. Despite the complexity of Bloom's topics, his point is really quite simple and straightforward. The modern university can no longer impart a coherent education to its students. The university can no longer agree on what 'must be taught'.

Choice is all the rage for college students today - and while course rosters are overflowing with new electives - the humanties have become so splintered that a liberal education now resembles a mere buffet of knowledge. Today, only technical courses have measurable use after commencement. The liberal arts university has always raved about transforming students into better thinkers - light, truth, wisdom, et. al - but in modern times, this high-minded goal exists in word only. The reality is that relativism, post-modernism and a variety of political movements have eroded 'truth' into 'worldview' and 'cultural values'. If truth cannot be obtained, and judgement cannot be employed for fear of being deemed intolerant, then what you have is the modern university: biased, pedantic, myopic, and ultimately, useless. It saddens me to say that because I graduated from one of the oldest, most-highly regarded American universities with a liberal arts degree. Out of respect for my alma mater I won't name names. Not that names matter - the atmosphere Bloom describes in the first chapters of the book were everyday realities in his day - they still are today, half a country away. You may not agree with Bloom in the end, but this book will acquaint today's college student with some legitimately new ideas. They were simply oblivious to them.

The ills he diagnoses are the best part of the book. Everyone has a horror story, it seems. For example, in four years of higher learning, I never saw Plato once on the syllabus. Before you write that off as anecdote, I'd like to say that I took about the same type classes/perspectives as about any other college student. Plato just wasn't deemed a necessary part, or perhaps everyone assumed someone else would cover it. It was only after graduation (and an itch from the lack of knowledge I felt) that I finally read the Apology, the Republic, and many other classics. After that, I felt jobbed by some erstwhile professors, well-meaning though they were. I could tell you plenty about post-antebellum race riots and American hegemony, but had never heard of the Socratic method. That is today's university in a nutshell. My education would have ended there if I hadn't kept reading...how many others' did end there? Although Bloom spends much of his book diagnosing the problem facing modern universities, he also proposes a cure: the Great Books program. Now, I'll be the first to admit that this isn't a panacea, and I'm fairly sure that even Bloom didn't feel that way. If so, the book fails in that regard. But to me, the reason he proposed that as solution is clear.

Books allow us to live many more lives than just our own - it provides us with a perspective that reaches far beyond our 70-80 years of personal experience. You know what they say about people who forget the lessons of history, after all. Also, the book helped me understand that Western Civilization was successful for a reason - not just due to bloodlust, which you'll probably be told throughout college. No - historically, we have measured the world with our science, we have explored the horizons with our curiousity, and we have questioned the very essence of what it means to be human, which carried us to the head of the pack. But if you acknowledge that there is much good to go along with the bad to some people, you will be called racist, sexist, and thus irredeemable. The university is the defender of the flame in a very real sense. When the stewards of our heritage don't care for the treasures left in their care, why should anyone else? If something doesn't change, that flame may well flicker out, leaving the world a dimmer place. This book is a good first step against that.

Professor Blooms magnum opus--really just a collection of various lectures he would give at the U of C--hits upon the great descent into meaninglessness of our modernist and postmodernist culture. There are many terrific reviews of this book on this website, but what truly interests me is how a large number of the bad reviews all hit Bloom for three things: his verbosity, his disdain for rock music, and his pretentiousness. The first and last claim are dealt with easily; he writes the text laboring under assumption that the reader is moderately well versed in the Classics of the West. So one must have already read The Republic, Being and Time, Beyond Good and Evil, Leviathan, etc. to fully appreciate what Bloom is doing here. This is not a text for laymen, nor is it one for whom philosophy consists of modern drivel like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Matrix. His style is remarkably succinct and readable compared to many of the masters he so eagerly cites. His critique of Rock is strange--as is the entirety of his critique of popular culture--but his general point is that this is indicative of, and is most certainly correlated with, the coarsening of the dialect and culture. It perverts the more noble and artistic elements of the liberal arts in general, and reflects the declining standards of the day.

It is a worthwhile read to anyone who is willing to put the time in and seriously contemplate the state of our culture today. Again, one small disclaimer: if you are not well versed in Germanic philosophy from the 19th century (Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, etc.), then the middle section will be largely incomprehensible. It was, one must remember, taken from his graduate level class on Nietzsche and Modernity, so it is not designed to be easily consumed.

I recently read that Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, c. 1987) was the most significant educational treatise published in the past 25 years, so I was prodded to re-read it. It was, of course, a surprise best-seller when published. Bloom wrote the book as "a meditation on the state of our souls, particularly those of the young, and their education" (p. 19). They need teachers to serve as midwives--above all helping students deal with "the question, 'What is man?' in relation to his highest aspirations as opposed to his low and common needs" (p. 21).
Today's students, Bloom says, "are pleasant, friendly and, if not great-souled, at least not particularly mean-spirited. Their primary preoccupation is themselves, understood in the narrowest sense" (p. 83). Disinterested in the nature of human nature, they're preoccupied with personal feelings and frustrations. Not "what is man" but "who am I" is the question! They illustrate "the truth of Tocqueville's dictum that 'in democratic societies, each citizen is habitually busy with the contemplation of a very petty object, which is himself'" (p. 86). Indeed, "the self is the modern substitute for the soul" (p. 173).
This Bloom believes, results from today's pervasive relativism, a philosophical dogma espoused by virtually everyone coming to or prowling about the university. Under the flag of "openness" and "tolerance," no "truths" are allowed and everyone freely follows his own feelings. This, students think, constitutes a "free and democratic" society. So even the brightest of our young people know little about history, literature, or theology, for such knowledge resides in books, which remain largely unread, even in the universities.
Minds shaped by films, rock music and television have little depth, and "the failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency--the belief that the here and now is all there is" (p. 64). A variety of special interest groups (gays, feminists, Marxists) have eliminated the "great" books (e.g. the Bible, Shakespeare, Plato) from the schools.
Complicating the picture, today's non-reader lives in what Rousseau described as "his own little separate system." Thus Bloom says, "The aptest description I can find for the state of students' souls is the psychology of separateness" (p. 117). The divorce of many of their parents has plunged them into an abyss of alienation, for "To children, the voluntary separation of parents seems worse than their death precisely because it is voluntary" (p. 119). More than anything else, divorce is destroying us, yet our social planners and politic¬ians studiously ignore it!
Having witnessed their parents' divorce, many young people shy away from any commitments, particularly marital commitments. So they rarely "date," preferring to hang around in "herds or packs" which require no loyalty. They enjoy "relationships" rather than intense "love affairs" which demand energy and risk.
Thus Bloom concludes the first part of his book, entitled "Students." While his wide-ranging assertions cannot be applied to all college students, they do provide revealing glimpses into the minds and lives of many of them. We who teach, forever trying to better understand the students entrusted to us, can profit from perusing Bloom.
The book's second section, "Nihilism, American Style," takes us in different directions. Here Bloom tries to diagnose the philosophical roots of today's educational malaise. He begins with "the German connection," preeminently Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger. An enormous intellectual earthquake has shaken our culture to the foundations. It is "the most important and most astonishing phenomenon of our time," the "attempt to get 'beyond good and evil'" by substituting "value relativism" for Judeo-Christian absolutism (p. 141).
Bloom's concern for Nietzsche's influence in today's universities is well-grounded. Much that marches to the beat of "deconstructionism" comes straight from Nietzsche. Yet for all the erudition displayed, all the enemies assailed, "Nihilism, American style" leaves one wondering if our students' problems, our universities' confusion, stem as singularly from Germany as Bloom suggests!
PART THREE of the book turns to "the university." Here Bloom at times turns nostalgic, remembering the classical studies of his youth at the University of Chicago. He clearly loves the life of the mind which he thinks is endangered in today's universities. He surveys the history of education in a chapter entitled "From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektorastrede," lamenting "Rousseau's radicalization of the German university" which transpired in the 19th century. Consequently, action preempted thought. Rather than absorbing culture, creating a new culture became the ideal. Thus when Martin Heidegger espoused Nazism, urging involvement in the creation of a new political system, he brought to a culmination the politicization of the university. From Heidegger, Bloom moves to American universities in the 1960's, which easily capitulated to the demands of radical students and continue to appease various strands of "political correctness."
Consequently, Bloom laments, the liberal arts have virtually disappeared in higher education. Students browse through a salad bar of "subjects," taught by professors trumpeting a variety of ideologies, without encountering a well-designed program of general education rooted in classical texts and questions. "A good program of liberal education feeds the student's love of truth and passion to live a good life. It is the easiest thing in the world to devise courses of study," he asserts (p. 345). All you need to do is read the Great Books!
Much that Bloom says makes sense. He opens a window through which to gaze at today's university scene. Unlike the "classics" he admires, I doubt this book lasts as a "classic" of educational philosophy, but it still deserves careful reading.

Well if this book was your first introduction to the Great Thinkers of Greece then Bloom is right there is something seriously wrong with higher education in the west. Bloom believes in a particular kind of education and I don't disagree with the kind of education he has in mind. He of course has nothing against current trends in thought(some good,some bad) but he wants you to have the proper skills as a thinking person to deal with the things of this world intelligently and critically and so be capable of sorting it out on your own. The way he sees most fit to prepare you to do this is to remain fast and true to those first pioneers of western thought, Socrates and Plato. I think I agree with Bloom on many points, especially his assessment of the modern university. It is a mess. Smart people who come out of a university today usually are smart despite their experience at the university not because of it. Its not that professors are bad but there aren't too many with Blooms scope of intelligence. Most remain in very specific areas and teach very specific subjects and do not convey to students a love of learning in the broadest sense. In todays university there is no time to learn how to learn, you just learn. However even without a master plan in place you do sort of catch on after awhile as to what is good thinking and what is bad thinking. I think what really bothers Bloom is that not everyone catches on. And some of those that never caught on have now ended up as university professors. It is obvious the type which he finds to be the worst. The type which write books which apply current or trendy theories, and revisit our intellectual and cultural history with a big red marker, correcting the wests "errors". This approach undermines Blooms approach. In a way both approaches are extreme but given the choice Blooms is certainly preferable and there really is very little room for a middle ground in this debate. I think Bloom is perhaps too conservative for my tastes but I would rather have a prof. who seemed like an old fogey whom I actually learned a sound method of reasoning from than one of the other types which just puts forth the current way of thinking, because current becomes passe very quickly. Blooms method of reasoning might sound very Reagan eighties but it isn't. He uses the same kind of reasoning the old Greeks did and he makes an equally timeless point, urging us to choose reason(and its rewards:the good the true and the beautiful) over mere fashion(no rewards but you may make a big splash in the media). I do think the book is valuable, as well as the books by that other Bloom, Harold. These guys know their stuff. They aren't perfect though and I do disagree with some of their finer points. Both would benefit from having another intelligence in the room when they begin because like many professors they tend to pontificate(which leads to some people misunderstanding them) when another tone would perhaps better suit their ends. Dialogue after all is the Greek way, a dialogue about education by these two like minds would have been interesting. Certainly conservative(in the academic sense)does not mean that there is no room for discussion nor does it imply conservative politically, it just indicates the style of discussion that will occur, a tradition bound one. I have found,perhaps ironically, that a conservative academic often is the more open minded one and (with the ultimate end being learning, not indoctrination) will entertain alternative points of view in conversation more readily than the liberal academic who often adheres rather stringently to a rather narrow agenda and point of view(the liberation of one group or another)and so it is not so much learning that is taking place but something very much resembling a political point being made.

Professor Bloom, in my opinion, generalizes a bit too much in describing the "modern" American student. One of those myself - a sophomore undergrad at the time of "Closings" publishing - I thought Bloom hit and miss when referring to the "average" American student.

However, he does an unbelievably good job in describing the ills in the "social sciences" and how we have arrived today at a place where graduate students study comic books and MTV is a weighty topic of intellectual speculation and where old masters like Aristotle are almost dissapeared (Does this reflect poorly on Aristotle or on ourselves?). For anyone who wonders at where we went wrong in the twentieth century, Bloom is like a breath of fresh air in the unwholesome swamp of the modern research university. Much of what I felt during years of instruction/indoctrination as a university student is plainly and eloquently laid out by Bloom - he seems to give voice to what was inchoate in my soul on this important issue.

It is not easy reading - even for the well educated. But nothing worth doing was ever easy, and if you want "fun" and "light" you can always open up a comic book again. On the other hand, if you really want to stretch your mind and engage certain "Big Questions" (whether you agree with Bloom or not), then read "The Closing of the American Mind."

It was the most important book I have read in years. Bloom may overstate his case at times, but there is the essential kernel of truth in what he says, in my opinion. Great intoduction also by Saul Bellows.

"But rock has one quality neither of the others do - it's still fresh. This is the point Bloom simply misses. People don't listen to rock because it's great, but because it's new. Bloom is simply unrealistic to expect a culture like ours that thrives on innovation to live only in the past; in fact, it would be unhealthy because it would lead to stagnation."
In response to Mr. Gudorf, Bloom's point is that Americans have no sense of the past, of the greatness of the whole western civilization that ultimately produced them. Thus they choose the new over the truly great, People Magazine over Shakespeare, and the Stones over Mozart. Freshness, the ability to be innovative, is indeed the American virtue, but we experience it at the expense of some other very precious virtues, many of which Bloom outlines in this book. To argue that living in the past (i.e. prefering classical to rock) is unhealthy and leads to stagnation is a most American response to Bloom. That very "stagnation" which Americans abhor is the climate that fosters the reflection of which genius is a product.
I first read Bloom as a college freshman in a colloquium my advisor signed me into against my will. I thought the book was only mildly interesting and barely relevant. I recently re-read it in my own leisure and realized the profundity of Bloom's arguments against a culture that suffocates greatness and thins the soil of the mind. I recommend it for parents (and those who plan to be) who want to raise children who are connected to a tradition and can think for themselves.

With Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, we are given the opportunity to enter a life of learning. Some who read this book are already living such a life, while many purchase this popular book unsuspecting of the invitation to a life of wonder that awaites them.

The Closing of the American Mind is fairly accessible at first, and grows increasingly difficult as it progresses. The history of philosophical thought can be intimidating, and is made more so by many teachers who, intentionally or not, are driven more by political than pedagogical concerns. But Bloom, who dedicates Closing "To My Students", is a discipler of minds who seduces us at first with a thorough and accessible presentation of the vague sense of superficiality and unfulfillment experienced by most readers. If at the end of Part One you feel truly known, if this is possible with a text, you then have the opportunity with the slightly uphill turn taken in Part Two to know, or, at least to know all that you don't know.

The dissatisfaction and malaise of modern life, Bloom asserts, can ultimately be traced back to movements in Western philosophy. Bloom guides readers in Part One through the damaging spiritual effects of contemporary music, books and relationships (e.g "The eroticism of our students is lame", p. 132), and then covers the same ground in Part Two, but on the level of the ideas that animate contemporary American life. Liberty and equality, Bloom writes, are the foundational assumptions of American life. These are philosophical ideas. As they have developed over centuries of Western philosophy, most intensely in Germany in the 19th century, they became increasingly problematic. Part Two of Bloom's book, entitled Nihilism, American Style, traces this development of Western thought ultimately through Germany and to America.

I am often asked for an introductory book on philosophy, and I recommend this book. Bloom argues, as one of his students wrote, that "philosophy [is] about the life and death issues that matter most" (Thomas West, Claremont Review, 6/1/00). The most commanding summary of the history of Western thought that I have come across lies in the 70-page section, entitled From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede, that begins Part Three, the final section of the book. The history of Western thought forms the critical background to many attempts to understand the world in which we live. Why? Because ideas matter. Whether you seek to make sense of events around you in the area of Western education or of Western politics, religion, art, or any other domain in which people seek fulfillment, if you are searching without the guide of philosophy, read this book first.

His thesis: We've stopped reading the Great Books, and because of that (simplifying his book here) our culture is now in decline. So basically, we should read "Great Books of the Western World" (or perhaps "Harvard Clasics") and reincorporate these into university education. Note: these books are usually available on ebay for like $5 per volume. I generally agree with anarchists and atheists, and while I don't agree with many assertions in this book, I still enjoyed reading this book. If nothing else, he gives reference to many ideas and books that are good reads.

Points I agree with:

1. Reading. He says we've stopped reading, and today we're ignorant idiots. I think he was spot on with this.

2. He is critical of our consumer culture and he's critical of faith over reason. Though he does say some good things about reading The Bible, which although I consider myself an atheist, I liked his argument here.

3. He supports liberal arts education. I agree with this; I went to college for engineering, and it was more like a really good vocational school, with very little in terms of liberal arts. At the time I thought going to college was so you can get a job, now I think it's so you can get a liberal arts education. I was taught nothing about living or thinking, just about the technical details of producing.

4. The Enlightenment. He's a strong supporter of The Enlightenment, and reason over faith.

Some points I disagree with:

1. He blames the decline in university education largely on radical blacks in the 1960s. I think he's really oversimplifying here, and I don't believe his argument. I think the reality is much more complex than he says here.

2. He says anthropology is good for giving data, but then he goes on to talk only about European and American writers, and avoids mentioning any of that data anthropologists give. So, you'll read about Plato and Pascal, but he doesn't mention any great thinkers from Asia or Africa.

3. He says engineers are good in that they are able to show people how great science is. I think by 2013, we've probably had more than enough demonstration. He ignores climate change, loss of biodiversity, overconsumption and overpopulation.

4. I wish he'd referred to his contemporaries, like Morris Berman (Reenchantment of The World, 1981) or Robert Bellah (Habits of The Heart, 1985). These people are writing about similar ideas, but Bloom doesn't really incorporate their thoughts.

While I do think we should read more, I think he's oversimplifying why our culture is in decline. He doesn't talk much about history or marketing/advertising, or environmental issues, or contributions from other cultures, for some examples. I would still recommend this book, but I don't think there is much original lasting wisdom here. Also in talking about the 1960s, he distills it down to radical blacks, which I really disagree with. The issues in the world revolution in 1968 were very complex, I think he could have done better taking some information from Immanuel Wallerstein (The Modern World-System, 1974, 1980)

In this seminal and provocative book, Bloom executes a powerful attack on what he sees as the cause of the contemporary intellectual decline of America's universities, and, by diffusion, intellectual life in the United States. The source of this decline he claims is a crisis in Western philosophy emanating from Germany and permeating America's universities since 1945. Indeed, Bloom goes so far as to say that Germany conquered America philosophically at the moment America conquered Germany militarily. Evil must have a face, and for Bloom the face is that of Friedrich Nietzsche, who appears like the proverbial villain behind every tree. Not to make light of his concerns. His critique is dead-on, and worthy of the most focused reflection, and multiple readings, and forces one to come to grips with the reality of what one's philosophical choices truly entail.

Championing "pure reason" from his beloved Socrates to the chief exemplars of the Enlightenment, John Locke and the "Founding Fathers," who built on "low, but solid ground," Bloom traces the growing "loss of faith" in the ideology of individual rights and in the capacity of human reason to address the problems that really matter. Beginning with Rousseau, who shattered the confidence of the Enlightenment "at the moment of its triumph" with his devastating critique of the society of dull shopkeepers constructed by Locke, Bloom holds Rousseau responsible for making "feelings" and intuition more fundamental than thought and rationality, and blames him for opening the door to totalitarianism by calling on statesmen to use the power of the state to remake human nature, which Bloom, like Socrates, sees as immutable, a permanent feature of "the human condition," as are all our philosophical dilemmas. Moving to Kant, Bloom holds him responsible for rationalizing the irrational, for providing a philosophical justification for a growing dissatisfaction with the capacity and relevance of pure reason, a position that inspired the Romantic Era, which celebrated national cultures in opposition to the universality of the Enlightenment.

His true enemy, however, is Nietzsche. From "perception colors reality," the central message of Kant, Nietzsche proclaimed "perception is reality, and there is nothing more behind it." No more radical statement against the capacity and relevance of pure reason can be imagined, and Bloom points to this message of Nietzsche as the chief inspiration of the "fascist Left" that dominates so-called "liberalism" in the United States today, having long-since jettisoned the simplistic and bankrupt dogmas of Marx, who "does not speak to the souls of young Americans." Bloom's chief complaint focuses on the notion of "culture," which Nietzsche raised to the status of holy writ. To Bloom, "culture" is not only indefinable, and something that permanently separates and divides humanity, but voids or cancels reason itself, the only truly universal language. Bloom equates culture with myth and posits science and reason in opposition to the cultural myths that Nietzsche loves so well. Bloom describes Nietzsche's views on the spiritual emptiness of modern science and contempt for the economistic comfort-obsessed societies of the modern West, dismissing as impotent "decadents" the "last men," (before the "overmen" to come) who have chosen a life of comfort, sterility, superficial equality, and atheism over a life of epic passion, struggle, and creativity, a decadence most evident in modern democracies. God is dead, he lamented, and for the good of our "selves," which is Nietzsche's updated version of medieval "souls," we must reconstruct the social conditions of conflict and tension which are necessary for creativity and commit ourselves to the "values" that are necessary to re-invent God.

Encountering the ideas of Nietzsche via German refugees from the Nazis, the sociologist Weber, existentialist philosophers, and Freud, Americans found themselves speaking his language of irreducible selves, values, perception, and culture, without realizing their source. The problem, as Bloom sees it, is that Americans do not understand the power and implications of Nietzsche's ideas, and, despite Americans' attempts to democratize him, and despite their continuing democratic impulse to invite all other peoples and cultures to join their melting pot, the repressive implications of Nietzsche's ideas have come to dominate the intelligentsia in the U.S., infecting universities and intellectual life with an attitude of intolerance towards reason and rationalism, a disdain for the Constitution and the motives of the "Founding Fathers," an obsession with "commitment" for commitment's sake, and a growing cult of "authenticity of the self" with its superficial pop-psychology, talk of existential values, and the irreducibility of one's feelings and perceptions. In the science-worshipping but "child-like" U.S., Freud became Masters & Johnson and Dr. Ruth; Nietzsche became Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil. On the darker side, the "will to power" implicit in Nietzsche's social activism has resulted in competition among various "liberal" factions for political control of America's universities, with a militant suppression of dissent and diversity of thought that coined the term "political correctness." Again in Bloom's view, Nietzsche's ideas in the hands of naïve Americans make the U.S. vulnerable to Nazi-like "movements," demagoguery, and tyranny of an entitlement-obsessed majority over rights-deprived minorities, which have no defense but reason. In short, we face the same Abyss that lies beyond good and evil which so terrified Nietzsche, but without the maturity and steady gaze that he possessed.

These are incisive observations from an eminent rationalist who wishes to preserve the independence of the academy from a society that has little use or respect for ivory towers. It is certainly true that Nietzsche's "self" is no more precise or demonstrable than was the "soul," and each self may in fact contain a plurality of personalities. And what good is it to tell someone to "be yourself" if that person's self is psychopathic, or a serial killer? The last thing in the world such a person should seek to be is "himself," and the last thing such a person should be told is that his impulses are authentic and irreducible. It is also true that, in Nietzsche's view, if values are to be shared then they must be imposed because reason cannot lead to values. Thus conflict on a grand scale is inevitable, and there can be no universal values without universal war, especially between civilizations, whose values by definition never coincide. Thus Nietzsche turns modern liberalism on its head: war is not an unfortunate and temporary interruption in universal peace; rather the reverse is true, peace is the exception to Humanity's usual condition of universal war, which should be embraced by true creators as desirable and necessary to the progress of Humanity. Thus the incidental overlap with Marxist class dialectics which eased the generational transition among disenchanted Left intellectuals, faced with the problem of the incredible shrinking proletariat, from boring Marx to the much more interesting Nietzsche.

Bloom, however, has done his job too well. Nietzsche's views may be misunderstood, or popularized until unrecognizable, or even dangerous, but in the end they are an accurate description of the human condition and especially of the position of highly creative individuals in modern democratic society. However, Nietzsche's concern was not with justifying universal war, but with facing up to the inevitable conflicts and struggles of daily life instead of ignoring or pretending that real problems don't exist, and with showing creative and intelligent individuals the way to self-assertion in the midst of democracy's vast wasteland of mediocrity. He sought to show vigorous personalities how to think independently of society's smothering prejudices, how to be a self-starter and reject negativity, and even how to summon the will to break free psychologically of society's skepticism and crushing conformity and become an innovative Creator of Culture, the truest leader of men and founder of new civilizations.

Nietzsche had thinkers of great artistic creativity in mind and these do not prosper in modern America. In the current state of the Decline of the West, like a scene from THX-1138, no creator is permitted to create, much less be recognized as a creator, unless he first takes an accredited college course in creativity and passes a standardized test on creativity graded by a certified teacher with a PhD in creativity. But the very concept of creativity implies supreme originality, which means an absence of any such guides and a complete bar to social acceptance. Thus in the modern West, and especially in the U.S., the truly original cannot be found teaching college courses because such persons are not recognizable as "experts" in any particular subject. Modern society by its rationalized and bureaucratic nature necessarily precludes true diversity of thought, especially "elitist" thought that dares to assert that highly creative persons may somehow be special. Were they to appear today, Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Muhammad, Homer, Leonardo da Vinci: each and all would be given lithium as lunatics, or clapped in jail as tax evaders for failing to file their tax returns, or condemned to wander the streets as despised vagrants for unwillingness to adhere to a 9-to-5 work schedule. Including Bloom's beloved Socrates, whom no university today would be allowed to put on its payroll, even if his talk about gods could pass the First Amendment Lemon Test regarding the establishment of religion.

The Culture Creator that Nietzsche wished to appear and renew civilization with a new religion cannot appear anywhere in the modern West because today's world is opposed philosophically to creativity, not only in art, which is today subjected to the "blockbuster" test of a formulaic "greatest possible sales" potential, which can only occur if it aims at the pre-existing lowest common denominator of popular culture, but also in values, which is precisely why the intellectual class in the modern West is atheistic. God, after all, is merely short-hand for the eternal creative principle of humankind. Atheists do not create because creativity requires imagination, opening of the Id. Atheists do not intuit, they rationalize. They join teachers' unions, embrace homosexuality, and promote abortion, congratulating themselves on their lack of contribution to the world's population and carbon footprints. They worship wilderness that is off-limits to people, and lobby for ever-larger secure government checks levied from "developers" and entrepreneurs who "rape the earth." Or they become lawyers, doctors, engineers, or other linear-thinking professionals and embrace elevated abstractions like "world peace" and shallow platitudes like "the rule of law," expressing unbounded confidence in the ability of sincere communication to overcome all obstacles and find common ground where there is none. They are pro-choice regarding the abortion of babies, but virulently anti-choice regarding the education of those children who manage to survive their egoistic family "planning." They take a principled stand against the death penalty for vicious murderers, but embrace assisted suicide as the last act in their agenda of conflict-free life-negation. They are captains on child-free Titanics proud of their ability to hit every iceberg.

Bloom accuses Nietzsche of preferring myth-making to science. But science cannot even explain consciousness, much less the mysterious elements of the Unconscious (the Id being another of Nietzsche's innovations). Where in Bloom's rationalism does room exist for divine madness, divination by dreams, meditation by chakra, the wahy of Jibriil, UFOs, will to power over a recalcitrant nature both inner and outer, ambition, curiosity, obsession, passion for a lover that can end only in death or madness if unsatisfied, or the ripping of the Veil from the face of Nature by one who will not be denied? There is room for all in Nietzsche's Id. None in the cold rational world of THX-1138. Bloom repeats the tired over-rationalized distinction of science versus myth, overlooking with his academy-confined and over-dialecticized eye, however, the fact that science and myth are not opposites but a continuum. Indeed they are siblings, even twins. Science is not against myth, but is merely myth armed with a greater store of accepted facts, while myth at its core is pre-science, or proto-science, or what is accepted by most as true in the absence of commonly accepted fact. Bloom equates myth with culture, and rejects both. But myth is the glue of culture, and human life without either is not merely impossible, but inconceivable. Man by definition is that animal that must supplement its nebulous fetal instincts with detailed social learning in order to live, and therefore must have culture, and must make myths to rationalize, organize, and perpetuate his culture. All humans therefore are myth-makers, and always have been, and always will be. Christianity without myth may or may not be possible; Humanity without myth is the ultimate self-contradiction. No human has ever lived who does not construct and organize culture with myths. Destroy these myths, and Humanity will not thank one. Humanity will destroy the destroyer--as Cedric Hardwicke indignantly smashed the moon-rocket of the scientist-dictator Cabell in Things To Come--and return to its myth-making with a vengeance.

Thus the attacks of 9/11, which were a wholesale rejection of the modern atheistic West by people whose myths are infinitely more important to them than the rationalism and the contemptible lives of the cowering "last men," who, in their Stockholm syndrome, are swept up with admiration for the commitment of their killers even as they themselves are killed. Thus the rotten front door of the West was kicked in, and its abortion-obsessed inhabitants distracted from their quiet discussions of peaceful suicide and a world cleansed of people. The US, if anything, should thank Osama bin Laden for restoring a sense of tragedy to the West, for shocking it out of its petty concerns, and proving that real conflicts and real differences still exist, of infinite more consequence than America's quadrennial furiously angry squabbling over tax codes and financial deductions.

Myths are not lies or falsehoods. Myths, in truth, are more truthful than facts, because they are facts presented in such a way that humans can grasp them at the deepest level and extract personal meaning. Myths have meaning where piles of statistics and charts and test-tubes fall flat. "Markets are self-correcting"; "women are paid less than men"; "aliens landed at Roswell"; "the Mother of God had a virgin birth." Where does science enter into such? Facts may at some point, but do their believers really care? Whose attitude will a mountain of scientific facts change? Myths are far more than rationalisms for savages thrusting bones thru their noses, they are what induce Americans to hand their life-savings to men in white coats, asking "How long do I have to live, Doc? Can't you give me just one more year?" Physicians are the priests of atheists and the imagination-challenged. Their myths are no different in kind or quality than priests of the old sort, they merely come armed with piles of charts and statistics instead of rosaries and crosses, but they cannot tell us any more about the path to happiness than did real priests. That depends on values and personal insight on how to best live one's life, and science has no answer for that. People want science; they tolerate philosophers--but they need their myths.

Bloom makes other errors. He credits the Greeks with the discovery of Nature. But the groundwork for the perception of nature as free of divine personality had its origin in ancient Iraq, which transmitted centuries of careful astronomical observations to the earliest Greek astronomers with tables of accurate predictions, and accurate calendars to organize those predictions. Again, the bridge from myth to science was not the light-switch that Bloom describes, but gradual, a continuum that deeply involves both. And Bloom claims that only rational philosophers truly face death. This too is palpably wrong. Religious zealots not only face it; they command it, embrace it, and use it! To call death to a zealot "eternal life" is to play with words. And Nietzsche was no stranger here either, for what else is the Abyss but death? Bloom thinks that the precepts of the Enlightenment and the People's rights are within our grasp and determinable by reason. But Rousseau and his successors showed the error in this, and the political correctness and vicious in-fighting by gangs of ethnic and gender chauvinists in today's universities, each attempting to excommunicate competing factions, shows how shallow the pool of reason really is even among the most privileged beneficiaries of America's upper-class, who cannot resist posturing en masse as angry victims as they matriculate with their Ivy League diplomas. If America's universities teach anything at all, it is that people are not reasonable and do not compromise in the absence of guns, and both Kant and Nietzsche showed the unreasonableness of reason itself, which is why the academy has returned to its ivory tower, unlamented by anyone. The "low but solid ground" of the Founding Fathers was, in the end, too low. Their tolerance of a society of miserly money-obsessed shopkeepers gave way to a glorification of selfishness where accumulation of wealth became a religion and genocide of the poor a duty under the laws of Nature, thus the outrage of Marx; shopkeeper society gave way to a glorification of group chauvinism and universal claims to special privilege with extortionate financial subsidies and demands for "affirmative action" and "reparations"--but only for those who can control the streets with their numbers and organization. Thus the Left in the U.S. today is "fascistic," and Bloom's outrage.

Bloom is certainly correct in pointing out the imperfect implementation of Nietzsche in America's intelligentsia. Nietzsche challenged conformism to stir up passion and free thought; the modern Left uses his language to enforce conformity and suppress thought. Nietzsche scorned the sexual act and called for sublimation of its energies into more substantial channels; to the Left sexual gratification is a right and a duty, and labels sexual repression a feature of "capitalist alienation" to disappear under "socialism," whatever that tired term may mean. The modern Left still uses the language of democracy for public consumption; but "equality" in the U.S. is a stinking corpse that every passerby studiously refuses to bury. Vast hordes of "liberals" squeeze into colleges, frantic in their desire to prove themselves superior to all others and claim greater privileges, each loudly proclaiming his love of Humanity while scorning "redneck" neighbors, and calling for redistribution of wealth and greater democracy while preserving tenure and strict hierarchy among educators. Each year witnesses the sorting of America's neighborhoods into finer and finer gradations of income and status, with gate-guards and cul-de-sacs, and taxes based on market valuation designed to keep the riff-raff far away, while deed restrictions are joined with criminal enforcement to ensure that no American has to rub shoulders with anyone who makes one dollar less than he, or with anyone who might have attended a college of slightly lower rank, or whose kids may make occasional B's instead of all A's. What's called for, if anything, in this most class-ridden society on the planet called the United States, is better implementation of Nietzsche's ideas, with a new recognition of the falsity of "democracy" and "equality" so that the creative can "be themselves" without becoming enmeshed in the usual American past-times of chronic divorce, violent sex-saturated media, non-stop ID theft, and credit card usury. Efforts to achieve universal "equality" in a world where no two people can be found who are alike in any sense besides having the same number of chromosomes, have become so tortured and illogical that it begs to drop the charade. This would be more honest, and perhaps more peaceful than the present predicament. It is not at all clear that the many American illnesses that Bloom decries are attributable to Nietzsche, or that a more authentic implementation of Nietzsche's ideas would necessarily lead to a resurrection of the Nazis. There is a great distance between a Van Gogh and a Hitler despite their common love of paint. But if so, it will be interesting to see what the fascist Left makes of true fascism after so assiduously annihilating all proponents of moderation and compromise.

Admittedly, not all myths are good. We can likely do without Sharia law in the West, though the logic of empire will require its implementation in time. Nietzsche also rejected Christianity as too passive, and this reviewer sees more-than-coincidental parallels between the deaths of Socrates and Christ, which seem more akin to suicides than sacrifices, explaining perhaps why Christianity so successfully fused the two cultures, and why Nietzsche, the preeminent classical scholar, firmly rejected both. But again we see that reason and revelation are inextricably intertwined, another continuum. True knowledge, it seems, lies always just beyond our reach, lurking beneath, waiting for the revelation from Nietzsche's Id to make itself known to the rational mind, coalescing just before sleep, or leaping from the confines of a dream. Bloom, again, is altogether too rational. Perhaps Timothy Leary could replace Bloom's sterile skies of reason with the all-consuming passion of penetrating life's mysteries, those effusions from the Id that make humans what they are.

Allan Bloom writes that many modern college students have no understanding of the underpinnings of Western Culture. True enough. What is needed then is a return to the tried and true aspects of the cultural tradition that brought us the democracy and freedoms we all rely on today.

Bloom points out that few kids learn how to think at early ages because the American educational system is more set into relativism rather than actual philosophy. I still teach the classics to students. I hope more will. Actually, all would-be teachers should have to read this book. Free copies should be handed out to all administrators.

Written in 1987, Alan Bloom's book, THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, has proved to be prophetic in it's description of what society would look like if the trend of leftist education continued in American universities. As Bloom warned, America has become a place where group politics dominate individual rights and the lie of cultural relativism has taken hold. America is in decay.
If you are looking for a book that will describe in detail the philosophical underpinnings of today's politically correct society, as well as the truths that established American society, this is the book you should purchase. Bloom is profound and provides ample evidence to document his arguments. You will understand how America arrived to where it is now, and why Americans think the way they do.

This is a powerful, well-written book, but I think it tells us a lot more about Mr. Bloom than it does about the contemporary (or at least 1980s) university system. Bloom decries the fact that American college students (possibly, he thinks, because of a problem with secondary education) no longer have heroes or wrestle with the Great Books or think critically about politics or each other. He holds up European students as a possible paradigm--with their own problems, of course, but more firmly culturally situated than Americans. My problem is not with these assertions, but with the subtle "no longer" attached to them, as if everyone used to have the same experiences Mr. Bloom had and now doesn't anymore. When was the golden age of the American university? The 1950s? The 1920s? The 1850s? Mr. Bloom's own experience--he entered the University of Chicago at the age of 15 and studied under giants like Leo Strauss and Richard McKeon--is so atypical as to blind him to other realities of the university experience. He decries the push for formal training, brilliantly stating that if that's all college is for, no one needs four years; but again, that subtle "no longer" is attached.

He also gets some facts plain wrong. He says that nearly everyone in the middle-class has a college degree; this just isn't the case, as the overall percentage of Americans with college degrees is now, in 2006, 18 years later, around 28%. He also says that every student these days is a relativist to some degree, and while there may be a greater preponderance of relativists in the elite universities Mr. Bloom is used to, this doesn't count the hundreds of thousands of students at Christian colleges, in public universities, and in specialized and technical schools.

His grasp of philosophy and the relationship between ideologies and ideas is spectacular; the book is gripping and poetic and a great read. But his arguments could have been much more narrow and thus much more powerful.

Enjoyed the book, although I feel the author spent a great deal of time and energy setting up his argument with a labyrinthine review of the general assault on reason that commenced with J.J. Rousseau, but was by no means limited to him. The pace picked up considerably in the last third, though, with Bloom's pointed analysis of the intellectual heritage of human-ness that has been denied the modern student, which made the early reading struggle worthwhile.
I consider Bloom's work a "proof" of C.S. Lewis' thesis found in "The Abolition of Man" essays, which I highly recommend as well.

Bloom should be credited with bringing this problem to the attention of a broader American public. Before this book, few people had a clue that college as they knew it no longer existed. Most people still don't. Yes, we can fault Bloom: he gushes over the wonders of ancient writers without giving any concrete arguments why they should be considered wonderful, and so on. But he also gives some harrowing specifics. And he turned a spotlight on a serious menace. If you want to know in what ways the situation got worse after the '80s, you need to read Illiberal Education, Who Stole Feminism? and others. This collection of books will also serve to refute the usual closed-minded claims that objections to the status quo come only from Conservatives. This is not about Conservativism, though Conservatives think it is. It is about education. And if you read the recent book, The Rape of Alma Mater, you'll learn that the situation has gotten so bad, we can now say it is about the survival of this country. Yes, it's that bad. See While America Sleeps: How Islam, Immigration and Indoctrination Are Destroying America From Within.

I think that The Closing of the American Mind (CAM) is a book that people should read for a variety of reasons. It opens several serious debates that are still ongoing and inspires most readers to several debates within themselves.

In part this is as much due to its hyperbole and logical howlers as to Bloom's insights and occassionally inspired writing. CAM has entire chapters that are basically wasted opportunities. I am thinking about the chapter of rock music. He has an interesting theory which is basically that previous generations were more educable because they shared a common heritage in the European tradition of classical music. Rock music, on the other hand, does nothing to educate the passions but "has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual passion" (p.73). Such a wildly sweeping generalization that ignores the cornucopian variety of rock music tends to create irate dismissals and it should. But an interesting possibility gets lost- what is the role of music in opening a person's desire for education and what music best serves that role?
(I have to mention one bit of high but unintentional comedy- open the book to the pages 64-65. Toward the middle of the latter page, you will find a snide (and true) observation about Frankfurt School writers who make a "habit parading their intimacy with high culture." In these same two pages, Bloom mentions Scrooge, St. Thomas More, Anna Karenina, The Red and the Black, Shakespeare, Austen, Doone, The Muses, Homer, Joyce and Proust. Bloom is the Mother of All Name Droppers.)

The first point I want to make about Bloom's book is that it is rewarmed Strauss. If you have read Natural Right and History and The City and Man you have already read the vast majority of CAM. And yet he only mentions Struass once and then only in passing. I can only conclude that he wants to keep that connection sub rosa. Why I don't know.

The second point I want to make about CAM is that it brings up a central fissure in contemporary conservative thought,i.e., whether that thought is Bible based or not. Bloom's conservatism is not based on the Bible- he wants you to think he is but it is not. Consider this, "Without the great revelations, epics and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there (into the real nature of things-GT), and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished." (60) Do I really need to point out that this is not the statement of a potential believer?Would anyone who really believed in the Bible as revelation really think that there are any other books of similar gravity?

So, for Bloom, the issue is the student's preparation for learning and the need for the great books in that preparation. To Bloom, the human soul has a desire for union with the eternal that has to be guided by the Great Books.

Which leads to my third point. Bloom is the Michael Jordan of all Idealists. Consider this dunk, "What was acted out in the American and French Revolutions had been thought out beforehand in the writings of Locke and Rousseau..." (162). Who knew? So much for the Committee of Correspondence, for the Minutemen, for Washington's generalship and the wise but differing leadership of men like Henry, Madison, Wilson, Adams, Hamilton et alia. All puppets of their master, Locke. I have to say that I think Bloom is even more of an Idealist than his teacher, Strauss. This is a problem that I have with most of the first generation or two of Straussians. Current writers from that school, like Hiram Caton and Paul Rahe have largely corrected this tendency.

Which then goes to my fourth point. Bloom also inherited a history from Strauss that is controversial to say the least. Straussians love to talk about "the ancients" as if they were all of a piece. Bloom tends to gloss over the debates among "the ancients" as to the whether all humans were capable of rationality and of philosophy. Or, to leap forward in the timeline, Strauss himself offered up a reading of Locke that is hard to distinguish from that of the Marxian, C.B. McPherson. Again this is something that later Straussians are much better on. Michael Zuckert, Thomas Pangle, Rahe and Vickie Sullivan are all much better on the philosophical history than Bloom.
I do like Bloom when it comes to Plato, Rousseau and Nietzsche. He may not be right in all the details when it comes to those three but at least he knows the details. With the rest of the history, he is a tyro- at one point he makes the claim that the Greeks were the only thinkers to develope a tradition of critical rationalism. I don't know much about Indian and Chinese philosophy but I do know enough to know that that claim is absurd. There are strong traditions of logic and rationalism within the histories of those countries' philosophies. As a final instance, Bloom seems to know nothing about John Stuart Mill but if there is anyone who he could paint a caricature of to fit into his history, it would be Mill.

The fifth point is that apparently Americans have not written any of the great books. For a book that is supposed to about the American mind, there is a total dearth of American minds referenced. His expert on the American Mind is Toqueville. Jefferson is mentioned once or twice, Madison by way of Federalist #10. Hamilton never, Melville never, Hawthorne never, Twain never. I think this is due to the fact that Bloom seems to think that we were doomed from the Founding. The script that Locke wrote for us had only its first scene in the Revolutionary period. Our current culture is the ending of that story.

I will not dwell long on my sixth point, in re Bloom's chapter on Feminism other than to state that it is bizarre. I am convinced that Bloom never had an adult love affair with a woman. I defy any man who has spent years living and struggling and raising children with any woman to read this chapter and agree with it's conclusions, let alone to write it.

So there you go. Bloom is an atheistic idealist who thinks the world is going to pot (literally) and can be rescued by a diligent reading of the Great Books of the Western Tradition. This is a bit of a sarcastic summation but no worse than some of Bloom's. I think you will be much better served by a reading of Rahe's Republics Ancient and Modern but Bloom is a far easier read. CAM does serve as a racy intro to some of the themes of Straussianism and also illustrates some of it weaknesses. I also recommend Essays on The Closing of the American Mind, edited by Robert I. Stone. It contains scores of essays from all across the philosophical and political spectrum that were written to review or in reaction to CAM. In fact, you are maybe better off reading that than CAM. I promise a review when I am done.

Have you ever read something that perfectly illuminates ideas that you have been perceiving on an intuitive level, but couldn't quite put into words? Have you experienced that incredible moment (all too rare) when a powerful thinker opens up your mind to whole new dimensions of thought and understanding? The Closing of the American Mind is one of those books. It's not light reading, but for those with above average reading comprehension and the patience to read slowly, Closing will take you places you've never been before.
I first heard about this book while reading Dionne's _Why Americans Hate Politics_. It was mentioned as a work that was influenced by the famous political philosopher Leo Strauss, who was very influential among the so-called "neoconservatives" (anti-communist liberals who believed in virtue and rebelled against the new-Left in the 1960s). Dionne stressed that this important group of intellectuals, having been liberals themselves, were particularly adept at criticizing the policies of the Left. I found this fascinating, so I decided to read Closing for myself. At the time, I had no idea that it would be a life changing experience.
This book is incredibly interesting. It is a brilliant critique of the American education system, particularly the University. It is even more relevant today than it was in the 1980s. If you take nothing else away from this book than a better understanding of a liberal arts education, it will be worth the price of admission. On the other hand, if you read this book carefully like I did, you will be rewarded with Bloom's brilliant mind, his incisive wit, his astonishing observations, his (sometimes overwhelming) references to the greatest works human history, and finally, an appreciation for the irony of America's great closing, a closing cloaked behind a veneer of openness.
I highly recommend this book.