Thus Spake BIooiti

...Bloom shares Nietzsche's impatience with democracy, with the bourgeois mentality, with the prudent self-interested Lockean principles that are the foundation of American government...

...In a New York Times Magazine article Irving Kristol pointed to Bloom's success as evidence that a genuine conservatism— not that of Reagan pragmatiste—is becoming the dominant American opinion...

...We look in vain for Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Henry James...

...Where Reagan would bring God back into the classroom, Bloom would introduce Socrates and his friends (although some conservatives might not consider them ideal role models for children...

...But where the TV evangelists would take us back to the Bible, Bloom, who has deserted the faith of his fat hers, prefers Plato's Republic...

...He offers the routine Rightist attack on Dewey, but makes no mention of the most characteristic of American philosophers, the pluralist and pragmatist, William James...

...Of the universities, and the young they teach, Allan Bloom can speak with authority...

...This index, in fact, shows how limited, despite its pretensions, Bloom's book is...

...Jesus he does not mention at all...

...Our ill-defined international policy is full of perils and moral pitfalls, but Bloom is not interested in contemporary history as such...

...Certainly any help from a philosopher in this bicentennial year of the Constitution is welcome—or any book at all that prompts people to think or read good literature, or that would make our present Administration more moral...

...The passionate love triangles of much classic literature seem to students absurd and irrelevant...

...Bloom says, without specifying what is valuable or worth commitment...

...Have you recently consulted a text by Rousseau or Plato to find guidance in a current crisis...

...It is especially striking because Bloom seemed to realize this in his excellent earlier essay on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar...

...It will, he says, outlast Ronald Reagan whoever wins the next election...

...America has been defining itself and its balance of powers, on the whole successfully, since the Mayflower Compact in Provincetown Harbor in 1620...

...He grew up in the toughminded Chicago of Bellow and James T. Farrell, and was educated in the University of Chicago by some of the most innovative sociologists of that period...

...Bloom sees America almost entirely through Continental eyes...

...The counselors speak in a euphemistic jargon that moves from doctoral examinations to TV talk programs and newspaper advice columns...

...Life style" is merely a fancy term for doing your own thing...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University Have you recently said, "Iloveyou" and meant it...

...Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are adulteresses, but the cosmos no longer rebels at their deed...

...The reason for the book's popularity is not hard to discern...

...Our society is adrift in a sea of ethical relativism...

...At heart Bloom is a romantic admirer of aristocracy, yearning for great thoughts, great deeds and great men, men whose heroism and love of honor necessarily show to best advantage in war...

...Nor is there any reference to the American classic writers who in the 19th century gave Americans a sense of themselves— a profound sense, not an easy one...

...Another kind of education occurred when he was on the Cornell faculty in the violent late '60s and saw the university president and fellow academics surrender abjectly to the demands of Black activists armed with guns...

...To rescue us from "relativism," the sin his book chiefly indicts, Bloom offers us Plato's Republic...

...The public schools are at fault, but so are the universities—"conceptual warehouses,' Saul Bellow says in his Foreword, "of often harmful influences...

...Considering that Bloom, like his teacher Leo Strauss, is preoccupied with the Greeks it is strange that he does so little with the Athenian tragedians, whose plays test out moral contradictions in a way that philosophy never can...

...His references to " nature" are ambiguous and shifting...

...He has no interest in the bread and meat of politics: practical programs and the achievement and exercise of power...

...Bloom is an idealist for whom all crises are crises of philosophy...

...Our grave social problems, both those the author discusses and those he ignores, require decisive social action, but Bloom has no interest in social action as such...

...The unwanted are destroyed...

...Even a Maimonides or an Aquinas could not reconcile them all...

...Early in June it hit the top, and promises to stay...

...Brigitte Bardot, Benny Goodman and Erica Jong are mentioned, but not the major theologians of this period, not Buber, Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer or Tillich, though their inquiry into moral man under the aspect of eternity is certainly as searching as Bloom's...

...Have you recently struggled to master a passion in the interest of a higher good...

...It is no surprise that Bloom feels a close kinship with Nietzsche, transvaluer of all values, and bitter enemy of the slave morality of the Christian gospels...

...A college couple can share an apartment where sex and the refrigerator are included in the rent, and then part with a handshake...

...Women are equal in the sense that they have to exercise naked before men and fight at their side in war, but children are brought up by the state, and the Guardians decide who should produce them...

...They will treat marriage the same way, though there may not be the handshake...

...The young never say "I love you...

...Back at Chicago Bloom was a member with Bellow of the Committee on Social Thought, and co-director of a Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy...

...18.95...

...To this effort a remarkable sequence of wise and even virtuous men have contributed, most of them ignored by Bloom...

...Brandishing the names of philosophers like Jovian thunderbolts, Bloom deals unsparingly with the current ethos in which, he says, we are told there is no right or wrong, only problems counseling can cure...

...In his scornful reference to most of the liberal agenda—affirmative action, feminism, gay rights, nuclear disarmament, abortion on demand—Bloom is at one with such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly, William F. Buckley Jr., Midge Decter, and Secretary of Education William J. Bennett...

...He has no firm basis in religion or tradition...

...Curiously, The Closing of the American Mind almost totally lacks the tragic sense, and in its ample index the names of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides do not appear...

...It is Nietzsche Bloom chooses as witness when he says that "the whole program of the welfare state" along with the modern desire to be welladjusted, to find a comfortable solution to problems, "are signs of the incapacity to look up toward the heaven of man's possible perfection or self-overcoming...

...But he makes a dubious ally because of the philosophic company he keeps...

...All it requires is a change in our way of thinking...

...Our false teachers, indeed, forbid the use of that word—as well as "virtue" and "conscience" and "honor...

...He goes on to write that "Nietzsche's works are a glorious exhibition of the soul of a man who might, if anybody can, be called creative...

...He edited and translated Rousseau's Emile and Plato's Republic, and collaborated in a book on Shakespeare's politics that faces up to the complexities of the subject in a way The Closing of the American Mind does not...

...The young, whose real values are expressed in rock music, are encouraged to search for identity in a cupboard that is spiritually bare...

...After nearly 400 pages and a good deal of bluster, his positive solutions to the general problems of our society and the particular problems of our education remain what they were at the beginning of his volume: Great Books courses (about which he is actually halfhearted) and a more moral vocabulary...

...For the Sermon on the Mount Bloom has no room in his philosophy...

...They can hardly learn a sense of the past from teachers who themselves lack one...

...If any answer is "No," what you need is Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind...

...Anna's son today would probably have been awarded to her in the amicable divorce arrangements of the Karenins...

...Bloom likes to call his opponents relativists without himself producing any absolute...

...The sex-obsessed culture around them has no understanding of love as Plato knew it...

...Bloom is witty when the targets are easy, yet what substantive contribution he has to make is not clear...

...For feminists almost all past literature is abhorrent...

...Any philosophic stick serves him to beat the liberal dog, but his authorities are so incompatible among themselves as to make his own claim to an independent philosophic position seem fraudulent...

...They gave him a heavy dose of Weber and Freud, to which he is still reacting, as he is to post-Hegelian German culture generally, seen through the eyes of his mentor, Leo Strauss...

...The cure is no further than the nearest library...

...It is not enough...

...In the strict class society imagined there—inspired in part by the laws of Sparta—no one except the Guardians has any freedom at all to determine his life...

...As Freud himself warned in "Civilization and its Discontents," this results in almost complete loss of the tension formerly sublimated in high art and other forms of greatness...

...Though he speaks from a university desk rather than a TV pulpit, Bloom appeals to the same anxieties as do the television preachers...

...The author's broad appeal, signaled by his scary subtitle, is to all those who have been told for a long time that our culture is in a bad way (as in many respects it obviously is), and that this has something to do with "values" young people are not being properly taught...

...Commitment and valuesarepraised...

...In May, without much advance promotion, this large, difficult book shot up in the best-seller list like a helium balloon...

...We cannot hold fast to the good, because we don't know what the good is...

...Finally, it infects the bloodstream of popular speech...