The Closing of the American Mind

Conservatives and the university, then and now

Allan Bloom caused quite a stir when he published The Closing of the American Mind in 1987; a critique of the American university from a conservative, insider perspective, and by a serious scholar at that. Even outside the US: I read it on its release as I was moving from Canada to take a teaching job in Australia,¹ and in each of those places it was newsworthy on campuses - my new Tasmanian colleagues eagerly asked to borrow my copy. Conservatives began to advocate, citing Bloom, that what college students really needed was a long reading list of the Great Books. The National Review came out with a guide to the “Best Colleges”, which essentially looked for places that at least made an attempt at Bloom’s ideal: St. John’s College, of course, but thoughtful parents and students could also consider big schools that made a point of a first year or two of the classics - Notre Dame, Chicago (where Bloom was on the faculty at the time he wrote this book), and Columbia (!), for example. In the New York Times, Roger Kimball wrote:

It is difficult not to conclude that ''The Closing of the American Mind'' is 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. And while Mr. Bloom's indictment is severe, it is by no means despairing. As he notes in his concluding remarks, despite the fragmentation and disorder in the university today, ''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.'' With ''The Closing of the American Mind,'' Mr. Bloom takes his place as an articulate participant in that dialogue.

I thought this was a good time to go and re-read. I admit to having a very faulty memory, and so what I might imagine now was in the book could be quite different from what Bloom actually wrote.² I’d then try to figure out what happened between then and now between conservatives and our universities.

By chance I had just finished re-reading Jacques Barzun’s Classic, Romantic and Modern, first published in 1943 and then with an extra chapter in 1960. There are similarities in the two books: both are from people who have spent their time trying to teach smart cohorts of American undergraduates about philosophy, art, and intellectual history; both believe our students gain lasting benefits from this, since looking at how past generations and movements have set and tried to answer the “big” questions - how can people be governed in a way that protects them from anarchy yet preserves their freedom? On what bases can we say an action is right, or that a painting is beautiful? What is a life well-lived? - can bring them out of their narrow, and typically very sheltered, upbringings; both are culturally conservative romantics, admirers of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and both were troubled by what they saw as their contemporary states of culture.

Barzun, in 1943, writes:

The romantics .. did not fear ridicule as we do, which is we why accuse them of indecently exposing their innermost souls. ... they were unafraid of being wrong, of being themselves, and of being duped. The modern ego is desperately afraid of all three.

Bloom, in 1987, on his students, who would be the children or grandchildren of Barzun’s “modern ego”:

Their poor education has impoverished their longings … What they do have now is an unordered tangle of rather ordinary passions, running through their consciousnesses like a monochrome kaleidoscope. They are egoists, not in a vicious way, not in the way of those who know the good, just or noble, and selfishly reject them, but because the ego is all there is in present theory, in what they are taught.

There are differences: Barzun attempts to be as comprehensive as concision will allow, careful in his judgments; Bloom has tried in one volume to set out everything wrong in the modern world and what caused it, from his students’ apathy towards ideas and morals, or even romance (he goes on at length about the state of their love lives, and I won’t try to figure out the origin of his confidence in these claims), to their terrible music, where he goes just a bit over the top (though I did get a laugh when he said that at least we won’t have to put up with Mick Jagger’s embarrassing on-stage antics anymore, now that he has passed the age of forty).

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In his Preface, Bloom identifies himself first and foremost as a teacher, his first duty to his students, and his task as being guided by an Aristotelian notion of “perfection”, or “completeness”: helping students come to identify alternative ways of thinking about what a person can become at their best. Students arrive at college at an age where they are asking (typically privately) “Who am I?”, and a liberal education can help illuminate for them “Who can I be?” in ways that go beyond utilitarian concerns.

Why the closing of the American mind? Decades of instructing students in cultural relativism - not in the natural equality of all persons, which we should teach, but in the equal value of all cultures and beliefs - have left them incurious about what is worthwhile. Bloom tells us that when he was a student his fellows often had a real interest in learning other languages and cultures, keen to try living somewhere else to really find out about it, but that with his (1987) students that interest had waned: what is there to learn from anyone about anything? The “openness” which students have been taught is the ultimate moral good - a John Stuart Mill-like liberalism regarding all speech and ways of living, though without Mill’s optimism that the truth is out there - means that there is less interest in putting effort into actually understanding and evaluating different conceptions of the good. “No judgment” of others has led to no judgment regarding their own lives and values. Bloom’s argument is loose, with potshots at liberal figures that must have constituted much of his appeal to the conservatives of the day:

John Rawls is almost a parody of this tendency, writing hundreds of pages to persuade men, and proposing a scheme of government that would force them, not to despise anyone. In A Theory of Justice, he writes that the physicist or the poet should not look down on the man who spends his life counting blades of grass or performing any other frivolous or corrupt activity. Indeed, he should be esteemed, since esteem from others, as opposed to self-esteem, is a basic need of all men.

But Rawls does not say anything like this; whether an individual wants to look down upon or esteem someone else for their choices is entirely up to them (that the state cannot do this is another matter). There are conservative critiques one could make of Rawls - for example, I might start by asking, as Michael Sandel does, how we are supposed to recommend principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance with no accounting of from whence our values arose - but Bloom is convinced of the notion that liberalism is the slippery slope to a complete relativism regarding moral truth, or indeed any truth.

He laments the condition of his undergraduates. In his own day as a student, he says that while Americans lacked a national literature, they did have the ideals of the nation’s history, its Declaration of Independence, with its stated commitments to freedom and equality. But over time young people were taught to be cynical of any such stated commitments, that they were merely in service to those who held power, and, together with the decline of religious belief and knowledge, and with families, even those without much formal education, passing along values and history, we are left with students who know popular culture but not much else, and not much belief that there is anything else.

I began teaching university in the early 1980s, and so I have some overlap with when Bloom was teaching, although he was at more elite schools, while I was teaching in good, but not awfully selective, public universities mostly serving students who came from that province or state. I didn’t see the moral relativism Bloom did, unless that’s the term we want to apply to any sort of liberalism (and we shouldn’t). The majority of my students were, as were Bloom’s, liberal egalitarians, believing that people should be free to live as they like so long as they don’t harm others, and people should have equal opportunities, with any sort of discrimination being sternly chastised. My students were not dogmatic about this - “free to live as they like” did not extend to behaviors that were terribly self-destructive. They were atheoretical, and came to their liberalism through conservative means: “this arrangement seems to make the most sense and lets us get along with each other.” And so, to take a current issue of concern, in my last years of teaching students were of the belief that it was very bad to have policies that made life difficult for trans people, but this was not because they had been taught the “gender ideology” that the right is now so concerned with, but mostly because they just believed it wrong to harass people for who they were and who they wanted to be.

In a long middle section of the book Bloom takes us through an intellectual history, of sorts, into how thought in American universities turned to an embrace of moral relativism, via Nietzsche, through Freud and Max Weber, then Heidegger. It’s odd, in that I would have expected that his discussion of “kids today” would be dated, and the history of the influence of German philosophy on the American university would have some permanence, but the opposite turned out to be the case - his discussion of students, while based entirely on his personal experience (there are no opinion polls or charts of data in the book, thank goodness), has some good insights into what it is like to face a college classroom today. But his philosophy section is focused on something that was a concern at that moment, but now seems distant: who thinks the great problem facing our students and their faculty today is moral relativism?

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Why does Bloom think students need to read old books? Because a liberal democracy, for all of the good it brings, works to shelter people from viewing their lives and society from the outside. Plato and Aristotle and Dante and Shakespeare get students to meet writers who set and tried to answer the big questions, but from perspectives quite alien to our own. When I was young I only really started to understand English grammar (and I know my writing here indicates it remains imperfect) when I tried to learn French. Universities have a separateness from the outside world because they need it to be able to think about ideas from outside our ordinary routines. Bloom:

The university’s task is thus well-defined … It is, in the first place, always to maintain the permanent questions front and center. This it does primarily by preserving - by keeping alive - the works of those who best addressed these questions. …

[For example]: Hobbes’s mercenary account of the virtues, which won out in psychology, needs to be contrasted with Aristotle’s account, which preserves the independent nobility of the virtues. Hobbes was thinking of Aristotle, which we never do, when he developed his teaching. In order to restore what was really a debate, and thereby restore the phenomenon man, one must read Aristotle and Hobbes together and look at what each saw in man. Then one has the material on which to reflect. For modern men who live in a world transformed by abstractions, the only way to experience man again in by thinking these abstractions through with the help of thinkers who did not share them and who can lead us to experiences that are difficult or impossible to have without their help. …

He knows there are doubters:

I am perfectly well aware of, and actually agree with, the objections to the Great Books cult. It is amateurish; it encourages an auto-didact’s self-assurance without competence; one cannot read all of the Great Books carefully; if one only reads Great Books, one can never know what a great, as opposed to an ordinary, book is; there is no way of determining who is to decide what a Great Book or what the canon is; books are made the ends and not the means; the whole movement has a certain coarse evangelistic tone that is the opposite of good taste; it engenders a spurious intimacy with greatness; and so forth. But one thing is certain: wherever the Great Books make up a central part of the curriculum, the students are excited and satisfied, feel like they are doing something independent and fulfilling, getting something from the university they cannot get elsewhere.

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What was the appeal of this book to the right? Bloom was undoubtedly a conservative voice, not one of those “tenured radicals,” - he is scathing regarding the student protests of the 1960s (his book must have gone to press before, early in 1987, Jesse Jackson joined a few hundred students at Stanford chanting “hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go”) - and so if he were saying that students ought to be spending their time carefully reading and discussing great books, that must be a conservative position, right? The Closing of the American Mind is conservative, but not quite in the way some people thought.

Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, which actively markets itself as a conservative school, reportedly said "If you take the reading of an old book seriously on the view that it's valuable, you have already discarded the modern Left." That is daft: in my career alone I have had colleagues far on the left who insisted that the problem with the contemporary university was that students were not reading the classics - I had a friend in Poli Sci who insisted that no student ought to be able to get a degree in his program without a proper course on Hegel.

It’s the technocrats who have no time for old books - what can we learn about marketing, or public administration, or health informatics, from Aristotle?

The Economics Department at the school from which I recently resigned does not even offer an elective course in the history of economic ideas, or in economic history, much less require it.³ Who has time for Hume or Smith or Ricardo or Malthus, or of the early Utilitarians who provided the moral foundations, for good or ill, for contemporary economic analysis? But nobody in their right mind could call an R1 Econ Department left wing.

The right liked Bloom because - in addition to the fact that Closing is a good read, witty and original - it looked like a weapon against that old villain, the left-wing youth-corrupting moral-relativist academic. But it turns out there’s no guarantee the prof who is guiding students through Aristotle and Hobbes is a Republican.

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And now? It was when J.D. Vance was but a candidate for US Senator from Ohio that he first said “The professors are the enemy” (as his closing line, to applause),⁴ but I think it is clear by now that, even though nobody reading this would have ever heard of him had he not attended Yale, he meant it. And his, and his colleagues’, remedy is not to get universities to hire more Allan Bloom’s and Michael Oakeshott’s (though for a time this was the Right’s position), but simply to wind them down - defund their research, tell young people to learn a trade,⁵ and through federal and (red-)state governments exert greater political control over curriculum and faculty evaluation. If universities are to continue at all, they must be focused upon “labor-force needs” (I began my career as a labor economist, and I am here to tell you that neither the politicians who call for this nor the captains of industry who cheer the idea have any clue what will be “labor-force needs” a decade from now, and beyond - there is no reliable econometric model that is going to do this for you. It is make-believe).

Imagine a contemporary American conservative saying something like this, from Bloom:

I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can turn into a blessing for society. Falling in love with the idea of a university is not a folly, for only by means of it is one able to see what can be. Without it, all these wonderful results of the theoretical life collapse back into the primal slime from which they cannot re-emerge. The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties. But such debunking can obscure them, and has.

Teaching the great books is a conservative act, even when carried out by teachers who lean to the left politically - I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that although faculty by far tend to support and vote for the Democrats, they are quite staid when it comes to what they teach. But if it turns out that having a core-curriculum of classics is not actually going to turn Kyle and Kaitlyn into young Republicans, and left-wing academics retain their tenure, then the new right has no time for it. Who needs Rousseau? What kind of job will that get you?

For a brief moment it looked like Bloom had expressed a vision of the university that the right could embrace. I’m sorry it didn’t work, because I’d rather debate the best books to include in the curriculum with my colleagues, than just to see the academy burn down.

1. Literally: I read it on the plane.

2. It is a running joke at home that I have the advantage of being able to re-watch old mysteries on tv, since while I might vaguely remember a character or setting or scene, I can never remember who was actually the murderer.

3. When I was an undergraduate a full-year course in Canadian Economic History was a requirement of the degree, a staple of my education. (There is a very obscure Canadian joke in there).

4. Shared by Philip Cohen.

5. Though I always think the real test of this conviction will be the successful Republican politician who encourages his own children to attend the local tech.