The reviews for Allan Bloom`s new book have been terrific, and it`s said to be selling well, too. Time and Newsweek have given it generous spreads, and Bloom has been interviewed by journalists from other mainstream publications. He`s gone on a network morning show for one of those wham-bam, three-minute, could-you-hold-that-thought-while-we-take-a-break appearances; he`s taped an hourlong ”Firing Line” with William F. Buckley Jr., and he was interviewed on radio by none other than an admiring Howard Cosell, who obviously no longer limits himself to sports.
Granted, this isn`t the all-out, super-duper, total-saturation media exposure that some authors receive these days. So far, Donahue and Oprah haven`t called, and People magazine hasn`t yet bestowed upon him the nation`s most exalted rank, Celebrity First Class.
Still, the reaction has been gratifying and surprising for the 56-year-old author, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago whose previous works have been translations of Plato and Rousseau and a textbook on Shakespeare.
His new book is ”The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today`s Students” (Simon and Schuster, $18.95).
In a preface, Bloom describes it as ”a meditation on the state of our souls.” It is more than an indictment of colleges and universities; it examines the manipulation of our popular culture by ideas we unwittingly accept and do not comprehend.
It is a compelling book, written with clarity, intelligence and good will, and its reviews and word of mouth should enable it to find its audience, with or without the full media treatment.
The New York Times has reviewed it in a weekday edition and in its Sunday book section. In the first review, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt writes that this ”remarkable new book . . . hits with the approximate force and effect of what electric-shock therapy must be like. . . . By turns passionate and witty, sweetly reasoned and outraged, it commands one`s attention and concentrates one`s mind more effectively than any other book I can think of in the past five years.”
In the second, Roger Kimball calls it ”that rarest of documents, a genuinely profound book, born of a long and patient meditation on questions that may be said to determine who we are, both as individuals and as a society.”
Today, on Page 3 of this section, reviewer Joseph Coates says ”it may be the most important work of its kind by an American since World War II.”
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”Simon and Schuster, I think, is taken aback by the book`s success,”
Allan Bloom said. ”For them, it`s one of the best-selling serious books they`ve had in years. I don`t think they expected this and, personally, neither did I.”
Bloom was seated in the living room of his Hyde Park apartment. A coffee table in front of him was covered with clippings, correspondence, books, an ashtray, a pack of his ever-present Marlboros.
”Everything–the Times reviews, the magazine articles–has been self-generated,” he continued. ”The publisher hasn`t advertised it, but it`s apparently selling.”
Bloom speaks rapidly, stammering occasionally, as the speed of his thoughts exceeds his capabilities of speech. He is intense, articulate, nervous, gracious. His gestures are expansive. He is tall, rather gangly and quite bald.
”This will obviously be a phenomenon of a couple of weeks,” he said, lighting a cigarette. ”These things don`t go on long, I know, but I`m glad it`s getting the attention.”
The living room windows look out on the U. of C. campus. In his book, Bloom writes: ”When I was 15 years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life.”
It wasn`t just the imitative splendor of the collegiate Tudor Gothic architecture that moved him so, although that was part of it. Even more, however, was what it represented.
”I had never seen, or at least had not noticed,” he writes, ”buildings that were evidently dedicated to a higher purpose, not to necessity or utility, not merely to shelter or manufacture or trade, but to something that might be an end in itself, . . . a bow to the contemplative life by a nation addicted more than any other to the active life.”
When he was 16, he would become a student there, his early admission made possible by a program allowing anyone who passed an entrance exam to skip the last two years of high school.
”I was really an unhappy child until I walked in here,” he said, ”but from that day on, I became happy. It gave me the sense of having a vocation. I have always loved the university, and Chicago has always been my model.”
He recently received a letter from a former classmate whose memories of Bloom as a teenage scholar had been stirred by having read a review of his book.
The classmate writes: ”And in a flash 40 years retreated, and I heard your booming laugh. There you were with your cigarette nervously poised, shirt open at the collar, one sleeve unbuttoned, your hair damp with the exertion of deep thought. Sentence after endless sentence chock full of 5-, 6-, 7-syllable words tumbling out of your head. `Adjudication.` I remember `adjudication` for some reason. I had probably never heard the word before I met you. . . .”
Bloom would earn three degrees here, including a doctorate, concentrating on political science and philosophy, and he would become a teacher, a good one.
”He is a teacher`s teacher and extraordinarily popular with students,”
said Nathan Tarcov, a former Bloom student at Cornell University who is now codirector, with Bloom, of the university`s Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy. ”He taught an introductory course in political theory at Cornell for perhaps 400 students, and what was striking was the breadth of his popularity.
”He attracted not only the top students but also the hockey players, the fraternity members. He can be very funny, but he is able to communicate to students how serious he is about what he teaches–not just as an academic exercise but as something that might help them think about how to live. . . .”
Bloom had touched on this. ”I`ve always felt more at home with intelligent nonscholars,” he had said, ”because they`re thinking about whether what they`re studying is going to be part of their lives.”
Bloom had his first chance to teach undergraduates when he was 31, at Cornell. ”I lived and taught in a house for exceptional students,” he said, ”and I was astounded at how very wonderful they were and very quickly I realized I could talk to them.
”We talked, we quarreled, it was heaven. I didn`t know how long it could last. I said to myself, `Well, they`ll find out how imperfect I am. I merely represent these great books and these great thinkers, but I`m not up to the level of them myself.`
”There was tension but at the same time a capacity to learn. And there is a passionate enjoyment when you see somebody coming alive. It`s vanity, but it`s also giving.
”I remember one young man in particular, because he would change his course of study from law to become a teacher. One day he became angry with me and was within an inch of calling me a bastard or a fascist and stalking out, but he stayed and argued it out.
”Six weeks later, he came to me and said, `You`ve changed my life.` One has this all the time in teaching. One sentence can change everything for students, and you don`t know what that sentence is. You have to keep trying to find it, to put yourself in their position, to begin at the beginning. . . .” —
Bloom writes that his book ”should be taken as a report from the front” on the state of our most gifted young people, the liberal arts students who attend ”the 20 or 30 best universities” and ”who are most likely . . . to have the greatest moral and intellectual effect on the nation.”
He is disturbed by the changes he sees. Today`s students, he writes, are
”nice,” if ”not particularly moral or noble. . . . Their primary preoccupation is themselves, understood in the narrowest sense.”
They don`t read, certainly not the classics, ”nor do they have the expectation of delight or improvement from reading.” They lack passion; they are unable to make commitments or to love.
They come to the university ”ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it,” accepting the widespread, fallacious notion that our founders were ”racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests.”
They–and the rest of us–have been assaulted by ”the old alliance of Right and Left against liberal democracy, parodied as `bourgeois society.` ” An example of ”this change in thought,” he writes, is the civil-rights movement. ”In its early days almost all the significant leaders . . . relied on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. . . . The blacks were the true Americans in demanding the equality that belongs to them as human beings by natural and political right.
”By contrast, the Black Power movement that supplanted the older civil rights movement . . . had at its core that the constitutional tradition was always corrupt and was constructed as a defense of slavery. Its demand was for black identity, not universal rights. Not rights but power counted. It insisted on respect for blacks as blacks, not as human beings simply.”
Students are just as uninformed about religion, ”the other element of fundamental primary learning,” the primary blame for which must be directed toward the family. ”The dreariness of the family`s spiritual landscape,” he writes, ”passes belief.”
The result is ”a spiritual detumescence,” a flatness and narrowness of the soul. ”(The students) can be anything they want to be, but they have no particular reason to be anything in particular.” They are smug in their ignorance, filled with empty cliches for every question and certain that everybody in the past was wrong.
Bloom refuses to be dismissed as a conservative curmudgeon who wants to return to the past. ”I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should or could go back to them. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them.”
Students, he writes, reflect the belief in our society that truth is relative, that one idea is as good as any other. It is a stunting tolerance, one that, paradoxically, has closed our minds. ”Openness,” he asserts,
”used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason`s power.” We no longer know how to make moral judgments.
The answer lies not in absolutes, he says, but in a liberal education that enables one to make such judgments. ”The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.”
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In a section called ”Nihilism, American Style,” Bloom writes of ”a new language of good and evil” that prevents us ”from talking about good and evil anymore.” It is the the language of ”value relativism,” which is ”a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.”
He defines ”the term `value` ” as ”the radical subjectivity of all belief about good and evil” and identifies it as part of ”the German invasion of the United States,” the emergence in this country over the last three decades of an imported philosophy shaped by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his followers.
”Our intellectual skyline,” Bloom writes, ”has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than our physical skyline by German architects.” His assessment, he declares, ”is not a know-nothing response to foreign influence” but the means to understand ”what we are saying and thinking.”
The target of Neitzsche`s criticism, Bloom writes, was modern democracy, and the absurdity is that we are not even aware of how we are influenced by these anti-democratic doctrines, which are contemptuous of the middle class and the social contract that is the basis of our political system.
”In politics, in entertainment, in religion, everywhere, we find the language connected with Nietzsche`s value revolution. . . . Words such as
`charisma,` `lifestyle,` `commitment,` `identity` and many others, all of which can be traced to Nietzsche, are now practically American slang, although they, and the things to which they refer, would have been incomprehensible to our fathers, not to speak of our Founding Fathers.”
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The final section of the book examines American universities, which Bloom says have failed to maintain a coherent concept of what an educated person should be.
The `60s, in particular, were a time of surrender to outside pressures.
”Much that was traditional in universities was dismantled during that decade, and you`re not going to put that back in,” Bloom said. ”I`m talking about the kind of traditional respect for classical literature, for visions of the educated man, our attachment to great philosophic models.”
This is damaging, he said, because the university is perhaps the most important institution in a democratic society. ”You can see that in various ways. The poor and the disadvantaged, the immigrants and their children have transformed themselves through the university. It has been our main source of enlightenment, science.
”But there`s something much more significant. The original intention of the founders of our democracy was to insure freedom of the mind and that meant the mind at the highest level, among those who were most competent.”
He advocates the emphasis on the classics of Western thought, ”the good old Great Books approach,” to promote a dialogue and provide the tools to seek truth, to ask the fundamental questions: Is there a God? Is there freedom? Is there punishment for evil deeds? Is there certain knowledge? What is a good society?
”The danger in democracy,” he said, ”wasn`t that there was an established church or that there were kings; the danger was in public opinion, and the university was, in some sense, to stand outside public opinion, to be loyal to democracy but to study views and opinions that were different from those held by the majority.
”In the `60s, however, the university got sucked into the system of public opinion. This is serious in a public way because good universities produce the kind of individuals who can be good scientists, statesmen, leaders.
”It is serious on a personal level, because we want our children to have the fullest possible understanding of themselves in the world, and we`re beginning to pass off a phony product. Our children are going to have stunted, maimed personalities.”
