Assaulting the American Mind
Rosenberg, Bernard
No one seriously interested in higher education can afford to read The Closing of the American Mind.* Or so the late Dwight Macdonald might have put it. He practically did....
...It's no use...
...If Bloom is acquainted with Aristotle's logic, he shows no capacity to apply it...
...The joke was well caught by Professor Robert Paul Wolff, who in an amusing review that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education treated Bloom with mock solemnity as if he were a character in one of Saul Bellow's novels, the sort of half-educated, fast-talking ranter that Bellow delights in portraying...
...The subhead reads, "The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa...
...He despises Locke, and the philosophes fare no better...
...Fathoming Strauss and his intellectual progeny is even odder than translating one of the "ancients" —all lumped together by Bloom as if there were no sharp differences among them, as if he had not himself alluded to an undifferentiated pack of wrong-headed pre-Socratics as against the faultless Socrates...
...German was his mother tongue...
...People who speak three...
...Trilingual...
...392 pages...
...Or the Physics of Aristotle, a work that, once rediscovered, helped spark the Renaissance...
...I'm not sure...
...If we have our own Bloomsday, it will celebrate the decline of democracy...
...And when Professor Strauss, a friendly, cherubic man who disseminated his retrograde notions with exquisite politesse, wasn't resorting to the argument that he understood an idea better than its originator, he had an even more original technique for disarming antagonists...
...He writes: ". . . the substantial human contact, indifferent to race, soul to soul, that prevails in all other aspects of student life simply does not usually exist between the two races...
...They must be conspicuous, dogmatical, exclusive, intolerant, on whichever side they are: the mode may be different, the principle is the same...
...and the tergiversation which it denotes is not likely to come into much greater request, till it is no longer observed that a man seldom changes his principles except for his interest...
...And nonAristotelian logic so frequently used by contemporary philosophers would for that reason alone be repugnant to him...
...Who knows if we are decoding properly...
...Allan Bloom is an American...
...Instead of excoriating the still powerful streak of racism among whites, both old and young, Bloom puts the blame mostly on the blacks...
...Both had bigger fish to fry...
...The rest is a mystery...
...If black students withdraw into their own circle, it is often because they are not welcomed by many whites...
...and if they do not prove that a man prefers his convenience to his virtue, they at least show that he prefers it to his reputation...
...Trump, however, has been a wealthy young man for quite a while...
...Well, as the joke goes: What do you call people who speak two languages...
...If pressed, I'd defend the proposition that Allan Bloom is palpably more fearsome than Bill Buckley...
...q Second Thoughts on the "Second Thoughts" Conference It would not matter, if these turn-coats were not in such violent extremes...
...All this presumably to escape harassment from vigilant censors in the first instance and, in the second, to reveal the philosopher's actual point of view...
...Substitute "international relations" for "higher education" and you have the beginning of a review Macdonald wrote in the early 1940s...
...And those who speak no language...
...The initiated are disciples of Leo Strauss or disciples of disciples of Leo Strauss...
...Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard, likening our author to the good physician in Plato's Laws, revels in the "clarity, gravity, and grace" with which he makes his case...
...The right has played this game all along but never more outrageously than in Bloom's case...
...Not knowing how to write a book, Bloom has produced one that is phenomenally successful...
...The inherently subversive message every philosopher conveys is written in a foreign language that requires translation...
...for he loses his character by them...
...write, Trump is doing better...
...Or maybe "Off of Nietzsche...
...Not quite...
...Besides, what excuse has a man, after thirty, to change about all of a sudden to the very opposite side...
...To be sure, as I everyone else has become 'a person,' blacks have become blacks...
...Anyhow, it all started with an article in Bill Buckley's magazine on the parlous state of American universities—just as Buckley's career started with a book-long lamentation over the absence of God at Yale...
...In an age of illiteracy, and in a country where forty-five to fifty thousand new titles get published each year, it's hard to think of one more expendable than The Closing of the American Mind...
...And, though he does not stop to explain why, Bloom can't stand Pragmatism...
...That the moment is passing or has passed, as moments will, he does not seem to have noticed...
...All right, syntax isn't everything...
...They must have singular qualms come over them at times—the apparitions of former acquaintance and opinions...
...I suspect something that we outsiders can never know: when a Straussian like Bloom is by rage possessed, his true sentiments more or less coincide with those that appear in print...
...That's Bloomesque English...
...an egotist never becomes humble...
...224 • DISSENT Assaulting the American Mind Because he too is a Straussian, there's no telling...
...And why the nasty swipes at John Dewey...
...There is none of that in The Closing of the American Mind...
...Thus, just at the moment when SPRING • 1988 • 225 Assaulting the American Mind compendium of hate with which America's book of 1987 is doing very nicely in 1988...
...Can the handful of private schools that so few of us attended have worked such mischief on our souls...
...Give a rational commentator the line-item veto on an opus like Bloom's and not more than the shortest of English poems— "I...
...The problem is not "explication of the text," which can be exceedingly useful...
...How do you make such a vice versa...
...Still, that is what we must be to provide a definitive critique of Bloom...
...His target was a great book—if not yet a Great Book—entitled How to Win the War and the Peace, tossed off by Mortimer J. Adler...
...But try a sentence just for size: After all, as Socrates points out, all societies look pretty much the same from the heights, be they Periclean Athens or Des Moines, Iowa...
...Nor are these exactly unprecedented incidents...
...How, then, are we to explain Saul Bellow's unfortunate foreword to these fulminations of Allan Bloom...
...Oldtimers will remember a book called What Karl Marx Really Meant...
...It leads to the sin of "relavitism," and there can be no doubt that Bloom embraces absolutism...
...We are served several quotations and many references to Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America Bloom misappropriates...
...I do not believe this somber situation is the fault of the white students who are rather straightforward in such matters and frequently embarrassingly eager to prove their liberal credentials in the one area where Americans are especially sensitive to a history of past injustice...
...That's the ticket...
...Bernard Lewis contends only that this "fascinating and illuminating book . . . should be read by every university teacher who is concerned about the nature and purpose of his vocation...
...Then again, mastery of the craft might be his ruination...
...For lack of space, I put aside his mysogyny, indeed his misanthropy, his homophobia, indeed his heterophobia, his slight touches of racism,* a whole * I can, upon request, supply quotations from Bloom to substantiate these charges, but let me confine myself to one, a slight touch of racism...
...On the jacket's back, although grammatically impeccable, there are six hymns of praise by scholars from whom we should expect good taste...
...Not, as Dewey called it, Instrumentalism, but Pragmatism—with no mention of James or Peirce...
...Between the two, they must be strangely perplexed in their own minds, and scarcely know what to make of themselves...
...Nietzscheanization" is baffling enough...
...His revulsion has the ring of authenticity...
...The rest of us must resort to guesswork...
...Bloom hates precisely those ideas that opened and formed the American mind...
...The Leftization of Nietzsche...
...Moreover, if a scholar chooses to regale us with neologisms like "choiceworthy," why, once you twist your tongue, you can perhaps swallow them...
...The borrowed quotations are clear...
...What's so terrible about the study of various cultures...
...Such an assertion is as perverse as it is unanswerable...
...but this is not their humour...
...Can the play, with its transient theme, be updated by replacing syphilis with AIDS...
...A man's nature does not change, though he may profess different sentiments...
...That Herodotus, surely an "ancient," is usually regarded as the most important forerunner of modern anthropology does not disturb Bloom...
...Education in the United States bothers him because this is "the American moment...
...The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom...
...Asked to define infinity, he said: "It is the distance from my office to Teachers College...
...Professor Bloom, if he read the papers as well as the classics, would know that in recent months there have been racist incidents on the part of white students at both the University of Massachusetts and the University of Wisconsin, both long known as strongholds of academic liberalism...
...There are exceptions, perfectly integrated black students, but they are rare and in a difficult position...
...Few of us are welltrained cryptographers...
...I accept that he truly hates anthropology and that it is a field embodied for him by Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Claude Levi-Strauss...
...An apostate is a name that all men abhor, that no man ever willingly acknowledges...
...How so...
...Bloom at fifty-eight or-nine has just made it...
...If he is an uneducated man, he may indeed plead ignorance yesterday of what he has learnt today: but a man of study and reading can't pretend that a whole host of arguments has suddenly burst upon him, of which he never heard before, and that they have upset all his earlier notions: he must have known them long before, and if they made no impression on him then to modify his violent zeal (supposing them to be right now) it is a sign either of a disinclination, or of an incapacity, on his part, to give truth a fair hearing—a bad ground to build his present dogmatical and infallible tone upon...
...This weary canard should have been dispelled long ago, if only by a remark Dewey once made...
...So reread...
...Let's suppose the left or the New Left got "Nietzscheanized" by Old Left Hegelians —already quite a trick...
...What really throws me for a loop in the subhead is "or Vice Versa...
...When is Bloom's subtle irony being put into play, so that in striving to follow him, dictionary definitions are useless...
...Do old people go on reading it...
...He should now read a book called How to Write a Book...
...For the reason that Bloom's fish, which he fries to a turn, is democracy itself...
...Not in so many words, for his words get too mixed up, but insofar as they are decipherable at all...
...They stick together' was a phrase often used in the past by the prejudiced about this or that distinctive group, but it has become true by and large of the black students...
...William Hazlitt "Arguing in a Circle" THE LIBERAL, July 1823 226 • DISSENT...
...There is a great joke here—that people of some education and seriousness should have thought this ill-written, incoherent, and pretentious book worth anything more than quick dismissal...
...Open to what...
...For upholding what...
...Adler once wrote a book called How to Read a Book...
...Too harsh...
...Bilingual...
...So should Allan Bloom...
...I twice tried to pry mine loose...
...Almost a hundred pages later he informs us that "the New Left in America was a Nietszscheanized-Heideggerianized Left...
...How do we know the truth value of a hosanna like that of Walter Berns, who enjoins us to read The Closing with "an open mind...
...It is certain, that the common sense of the world condemns these violent changes of opinion...
...But it's not education—about which he has extremely little to say—that really interests Bloom...
...Got it...
...Buckley, you might say, was an early Bloomer...
...Most of Bloom's negative political effusions are devoted to attacking the Enlightenment...
...Should Ronald Reagan or any future president enjoy the luxury of a line-item veto...
...18.95...
...Nothing happens...
...To the hogwash that Margaret Mead was a "sexual adventuress...
...With just the right combination of words Bloom said it all: "I am not a writer...
...There's hardly a paragraph without some such peculiarity embedded in Bloom's formulations...
...Asked by Atlas about Bloom, Grene characterized his quondam student as "a bloody lunatic...
...Many of us heard Leo Strauss, when cornered by professional opponents on the nature of Kant's philosophy with copious quotations from Kant himself, actually insist that he knew Kant better than Kant did...
...We can grapple with a sentence that appears on page 108 even if it takes some doing...
...Bloom's fondness for "off of," as in Heidegger bouncing "off of" Nietzsche, may just be a little prepositional infatuation...
...Again and again Chicago's celebrity-philosopher makes selective references only to Tocqueville's view of the price that would have to be paid for democracy and never to Tocqueville's equally strong conviction that the price was worth paying...
...No doubt Socrates was a farsighted man, but could he really have had a fix on Des Moines, Iowa...
...By liberally sprinkling such barbarisms through his philippic, Bloom stands as a living refutation of his thesis that good schooling produces an educated man...
...Although they rarely agreed with Strauss, no one went so far as David Grene, an eminent Chicago classicist...
...Perhaps...
...Perhaps these early readers just browsed in a manuscript that I read syllable for syllable—and more than once—in a vain effort to find something other than spite, spleen, and bile, too seldom coherent or intelligible, except to the initiated...
...New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987...
...If they were contented to correct, and qualify their youthful extravagances, and to be taught by experience to steer a middle course, and pay some deference to the conclusions of others, it would be mighty well...
...Consider in a chapter on "Nihilism, American Style," the subhead for a ten-page hodgepodge, replete with errors and outbursts...
...That Bloom is not a writer I know from his declaration, a secret "confided" to the journalist James Atlas, who published it in the New York Times Magazine...
...And one must begin to wonder whether there is any permanent literature for them, because there do not seem to them to be permanent problems for them...
...A Socinian may become a Calvinist, or a Whig a Tory: but a bigot is always a bigot...
...Who but a doctrinaire practitioner of far-right hermeneutics could fail to see it...
...Applied to the left, Bloom really spins out of control...
...Or are such bilious exclamations Bloom's supersubtle way of indicating the opposite of what his clumsy English symbols mean to those who do not share the Straussean revelation...
...That, in a word, is Tocqueville's point...
...the promised reward was a big one...
...Naturally, therefore, he wrote better English than his American followers and their followers...
...You can work on that till the cows come home...
...Strauss would contend that every philosopher wrote only between the lines...
...Twenty-five-hundred years before that splendid metropolis came into being...
...Through the medium of one Hegelian Marxist or another, chiefly Herbert Marcuse but also Theodor Adorno and Georg Lukacs, "the most prominent Marxist intellectual of this century...
...Those who go over from the winning to the losing side, do not incur this appellation...
...They can have found little or nothing, except some rant that the souls of today's students have been impoverished at least partly because of the lower progressive education inflicted on them by John Dewey...
...It happens that I was exposed to Strauss for some years at the New School for Social Research, where émigrés constituted most of the faculty...
...The clinical part is a psychiatric question...
...Try another: "Ibsen's Ghosts, for example, lost all its force for young people when syphilis ceased to be a threat...
...The master did express himself with gravity, grace, and a semblance of clarity...
...It's hard to check...
...Especially when hundreds of post-Platonic men and women and the sinister forces they released did so much to close the American mind...
...The dust jacket follows this rhapsodic assessment with a puff in which I half suspect Bloom had a hand...
...His avowal of worship for "the ancients" rings hollow, for even if we narrow that abstraction down to Plato and Aristotle, too much is omitted...
...Still fuzzy...
...Where and when, oh Allan B., was Progressive Education ever implemented in the public or parochial schools of America...
...Hence the need for interpretation, or hermeneutics, as Bloom repeatedly labels his own prolonged exercise in obfuscation...
...Keep not knowing and you'll go far, maybe as far as Adler, who even in 1988 is breathing down Bloom's neck with Aristotle for Everybody...
...and however we may count them fools, they can't be called knaves into the bargain...
...But remember that Bloom's book, in all its sustained incoherence, is supposed to be about higher education, and, presumably, thousands of people worried about the state of higher education bought the book hoping to find some answers to their problems...
...Some dialogues are mentioned, but what about, e.g., the Thaetetus, which many logicians but no known Straussians greatly admire...
...Else why does the writer say that "what we see" through Bloom's eyes "is," and not "are," young people of a certain sort...
...Americans...
...Bloom seldom cites a source, and unfortunately, Socrates, like Bloom, was no writer...
...The question's debatable...
...Is Berns serious...
...Read with an open mind...
...But suppose it anyway...
...It has just been pushed to an extreme by a "StraussianizedHermeneuticized" school of political philosophy...
...Conor Cruise O'Brien asserts, "This learned, passionate book, plainly and elegantly written, often with subtle or pungent irony, will have to be read [here we go, Dwight!] by anyone seriously concerned with universities...
...Insiders, those who have received the code by apostolic succession, will be at home...
...Our Nobel laureate recommends the work as "an indispensable guide for discussion, a completely articulated, historically accurate summary," etc...
...Bloom prefers aristocracy...
...would be left...
...Strauss's method, in one form or another, is not exactly new...
...The cows come home, go out to pasture, and SPRING • 1988 • 223 Assaulting the American Mind come home again...
...That John Dewey was a "big baby...
...In his squib, most of which I memorized, Macdonald remarked, "Mr...
Vol. 35 • April 1988 • No. 2
