Re-opening the American mind
Twenty-five years on, a re-read of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind reveals just how wrong liberals were to hate it, and how wrong conservatives were to claim it as their ideological bible.
‘The first shot in the culture wars’ was fired 25 years ago, with the publication of Allan Bloom’s landmark book, The Closing of the American Mind. That was Camille Paglia’s apt description, and the reverberations of Bloom’s shot can still be felt today. The ‘war’ over culture has seen flare-ups and ceasefires since the 1980s, but the basic idea behind it - that liberals and conservatives are defined by deeply opposed values, not just different political ideas - remains an important way in which American politics is understood.
Bloom’s book rose to prominence in large part thanks to those culture wars, as conservatives embraced his views as their own, and liberals interpreted his argument as an attack on them. Bloom charged universities with abandoning their mission to provide a liberal arts education. Higher education had not just declined, it had - as the subtitle of the book put it - ‘failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students’. He argued that the problems on college campuses reflected a broader social and intellectual crisis in the country.
Mention The Closing of the American Mind, and there’s a very good chance someone will dredge up Bloom’s attack on students and rock music. Here is Bloom in full flow:
‘Picture a 13-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home during his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, life-like electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a non-stop, commercially pre-packaged masturbational fantasy.’
Conservatives lapped it up, and saw a like-minded fellow who wanted to restore traditional morality. Liberals were repelled, and saw a fuddy-duddy who wanted to turn back the clock. A set-piece culture clash…