The Closing of the American Mind Revisited

This you've got to read. R.R. Reno takes a twentieth anniversary symposium revisiting Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind as an opportunity to personally revisit Bloom's cultural critique of twenty years ago. Has it really been that long? In his essay, "The Closing of the American Mind Revisited," On the Square (Feb. 27, 2007), he recalls how Bloom's book was a real sensation and a surprise bestseller and says that, looking back, he can see why. He writes:

The Closing was more than a highbrow attack on contemporary academic careerism (a la Jacques Barzun), a middlebrow defense of great books (a la E. D. Hirsch), or a populist exposé of tenured radicals and puerile campus ideologues (a la David Horowitz). The gist of Bloom’s polemic—and the book was nothing if not a long, erudite, and hyperbolic polemic—was a brief against the cultural revolution of the 1960s. He said out loud what liberal elite culture could only regard as heresy: The supposed idealism of the 1960s was, in fact, a new barbarism. Whatever moral and spiritual seriousness the long tradition of American pragmatism had left intact in university life, the anti-culture of the left destroyed.

The result? Higher education has become, argued Bloom, the professional training of clever and sybaritic animals, who drink, vomit, and fornicate in the dorms by night while they posture critically and ironically by day. Bloom identified moral relativism as dogma that blessed what he called “the civilized reanimalization of man.” He saw a troubling, dangerous, and soulless apathy that pleasured itself prudently with passing satisfactions (“Always use condoms!” says the sign by the dispenser in the bathroom) but was moved by no desire to know good or evil, truth or falsehood, beauty or ugliness.

There's much more about Catholic education , the suggestion that leaders in Catholic education should revisit Bloom's spiritual diagnosis, and further comparative analysis of the relation between Bloom's analysis and that of John Paul II in Fides et Ratio. This is an essay well worth reading.