“Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.”
Have universities lost the plot and given up on their educative mission?
For anyone who wants to understand the culture wars of today, at least one important aspect of it, reading Allan Bloom’s book is a safe bet. Written in 1987 and becoming an instant success that no one really expected, Bloom’s critique sparked outrage and a sense of unease in universities, and raked in millions for writer and publisher as an anxious public was dying to find out exactly how higher ed was failing the future of democracy in America. This legitimate anxiety has since crossed the pond and reached Europe.
Bloom, a student of the famed Leo Strauss, was part of the ivory tower that was the University of Chicago when it still had the best Liberal Arts curriculum in the country. A professor of political philosophy, his translation of Plato’s Republic is highly praised, he wanted to say out loud what everybody already felt was true: the sixties had ruined the highest ideal of the university, the search for the “truth about life”. Hedonism, careerism, consumerism, and most of all the relativism ardently pushed by the New Left were not progress to him because it all created a life of emptiness, a nihilist society. And the university was dangerously conforming to that world when it was meant to stand apart.
It is a book that is hard to define and thus difficult to review. Some of its arguments are highly abstract but satisfying, while some parts are ramblings, albeit really funny ones, about the decadence of society, German intellectual influence, and Mick Jagger’s hip moves. His rant is divided in three parts, and the second one is, simply put, the most amazing philosophy course you will ever attend.
Although the book is today sadly viewed as a conservative pamphlet, Bloom wrote as a moderate Liberal Democrat genuinely worried about the future of his students. As his friend Saul Bellow mentions in the introduction, “Academics (…) seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals.” Bloom was willing to take the risk for what he believed was important. We should take the risk to be challenged by his writings.
Highly recommended.
The Closing of the American Mind
by Allan Bloom
Simon & Schuster, 2012
404 pages
Bookish Felix 