In re Allan Bloom: A Respectful Dissent

GEORGE ANASTAPLO

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George Anastaplo is Professor of Law, Loyola University of Chicago, and Lecturer in the Liberal Arts, the University of Chicago. Published in The Great Ideas Today, an Encyclopedia Britannica publication. 1988: 252-273. Reprinted in Essays on The Closing of the American Mind, ed. Robert L. Stone (Chicago Review Press, 1989): 267-284.

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Aronson sent up a cry of rapture when he won the million dollar prize in a lottery.
      Levi asked him, "What made you pick a number like 52, anyway?"
      "It came to me in a dream," replied Aronson. "I dreamed I was in a theater, and on the stage there were six columns of dancers with eight dancers in each column. So I chose 52."
      "But six times eight is 48 not 52!" said Levi.
      Aronson chortled, "So o.k., you be the mathematician!"

-- Anon.¹

Prologue

If it had been at all anticipated that a million copies of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind would eventually be sold, many things in it would no doubt have been written much more carefully than they were -- but if that had been done, the book would have sold nowhere near as well as it has.²

Professor Bloom's widely acclaimed book provides shorthand reminders of what is wrong in higher education today. Everywhere one goes this year on campuses, one encounters people interested in the Bloom phenomenon, just as last year one encountered people interested in the Bork phenomenon. Since I am known to have been in school with both Robert Bork and Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago (in the Law School and the Committee on Social Thought, respectively), I have been asked many times about these celebrities who share the not altogether happy capacity of saying plausible, even sensible, things in a highly provocative manner.³

We are all in Mr. Bloom's debt for the dozens of fine students in political philosophy he has helped train and for several fine things he has published.⁴ Particularly instructive have been his studies of Shakespeare,⁵ his translation of Plato's Republic,⁶ and his translation of Rousseaus Emile.⁷ We would be even further in his debt if he could now transfomm some of his phenomenal winnings from the best-seller lottery into the leisure needed to prepare for publication his brilliant doctoral dissertation on Isocrates.⁸

Mr. Bloom is one of many who are privileged to recognize Leo Strauss as a teacher.⁹ He, however, has had a publishing success inconceivable for his master. In fact, I estimate that more copies of Closing have been sold than of all the books published by Mr. Strauss and his other students combined.¹⁰ For better and for worse, the form, tone, and substance of Closing will represent to many, for a long time to come, what the Straussian persuasion means.¹¹

The Closing of the American Mind has become an "event," making it difficult for us to assess the book in itself. Since there is in its overall argument relatively little that is both new and sound, it would not warrant much attention if it were merely still another academic title. But the astonishing reception of the book places it outside the normal range of scholarly interest. One can be reminded of what the citizens of Thebes faced when they discovered the remarkably unnatural creature they had in Oedipus. We can see great success turn into an appalling curse in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos.

In any event, the unnatural is hard to talk about because the usual points of reference are not available. In Mr. Blooms circumstances, moreover, a clear grasp of the situation is hard to secure by those who cannot help but be jealous of, as well as appalled by, what has chanced to happen.

1.

The unnatural was once readily associated with the impious. Something of the impious may be detected in Mr. Bloom's book, which is rather odd considering that it stands for a return to an older way of education.

One form impiety can take is neglect of one's origins and teachers. Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom's principal teacher, is ignored, even though there are in his book dozens, if not hundreds, of echoes of that teachers work.¹² Nor can one easily gather from this book that most of the things Mr. Bloom has to say about the current failings of higher education in this country are things already long bruited about at the University of Chicago and elsewhere when he first arrived on the academic scene in the 1940s.¹³

To be sure, Mr. Bloom is prepared, in private conversations and in public interviews, to acknowledge both Mr. Strauss and the University of Chicago.¹⁴ But the stance taken throughout his book is that of the pioneer staking out new ground rather than that of the laborer cultivating soil already cleared by others. This desperate self-assertiveness, which is less generous than Mr. Bloom is naturally inclined to be, is intimately linked, I suspect, to his decision to dramatize the 1960s as somehow the point of departure in the United States for the crisis he is announcing.¹⁵

Is it not misleading to permit a grounding in the classics to seem so self-centered that one can neglect what is due to one's teachers and to one's community?¹⁶ This is the questionable side of what is often condemned as "elitism." Certainly, it is not healthy to leave the impression that those upon whom one has depended, and from whom one has learned much, have not been duly appreciated. This is an instructive aspect of that extreme form of impiety found in an obvious repudiation of the divine.

II.

Something of the determination to enlist everything in the service of his thesis may be seen in the way Mr. Bloom deals with the texts of the great writers he draws upon. One can easily get the impression, if this book were all one had to go by, that he never truly studies such books but merely uses them. I am reminded of a comment I once heard from Mr. Strauss about Nietzsche: he always found Nietzsche interesting in his masterful generalizations, but he often found him simply wrong in the details which he could check out for himself.¹⁷

One observation after another in Closing is questionable: Socrates is presented more in opposition to Achilles than Plato indicates;¹⁸ Aristotle is presented as saying that sexual intercourse, rather than moral virtue, is one of man's two peaks;¹⁹ enterprising moderns such as Hobbes and Locke are presented as if they wanted to uproot ambition;²⁰ Maimonides is presented as if he identified theology with philosophy;²¹ Goethe is presented in a way that seems to leave a useful discussion dependent upon errors in translation of a key passage in Faust;²² Schiller is presented in a way that makes him seem far less sophisticated than he is about Homer;²³ and Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are presented as "thinkers of the very highest order," even though they are fundamentally wrong in critical respects.²⁴ One can easily conclude that there is in the abundance of Closing, which is much more biographical and sociological than philosophical, hardly a statement about any of the great authors or their books that can be confidently relied upon.²⁵

It may even make one wonder what good the kind of education advocated in Closing is if it should exhibit, if not depend upon, such unreliable scholarship. There is a warning here for all of us who have been liberated by Mr. Strauss, who was himself the model of care and restraint in his broad-ranging scholarship, however daring and unconventional he was willing to appear in his conclusions. A proper education should make one cautious in one's uses of sources, moderate in the tone of one's political and social advocacy, and anything but overbearing in one's assessment of the less enlightened, keeping in mind that it is usually easier to attack than to defend. Related to these concerns is the perennial question of how influential the traditional education can be if its advocates display themselves, both in public and in private, as decidedly self-indulgent.

Someone may protest that it is not fair to assess Closing as a scholarly work. Still, all reports indicate that it was originally prepared as a book that would appeal only to a limited academic audience. It is common knowledge that the publisher had a lot to say about how the text should be rearranged. What governed the arrangement of the material was not the authors ideas but the publishers commercial instincts, with the "packaging" of the book taking precedence over its substance. Cannot we see reflected in such deference to consumerism one major cause of the deterioration of American education rightly decried by Mr. Bloom?

It is difficult to take seriously any book whose author has acquiesced in a comprehensive rearrangement of what he had thought fit to say. Mr. Strauss, on the other hand, was legendary in his insistence upon the integrity of those scholarly texts he had carefully prepared.²⁶ He would have found congenial the injunction issued by another fastidious author²⁷ to his publisher "I write; you print"

III.

The deficiencies all too evident in Mr. Bloom's use of books and authors in the great Western tradition may be seen as well in his handling of American things, not least with respect to the origins and principles of the regime. He has too low a view of the Founders, virtually taking them to have been primarily Hobbesians. He does not seem to appreciate what Mr. Strauss said about the elevated character of what the Founders said and did.²⁸ But then, Mr. Bloom himself is so much more interested in intellectual accomplishments than in the moral virtues that he can easily be taken to be a nihilist.²⁹ Be that as it may, his approach, which runs the risk of mere crankiness if not even of sterility, raises serious questions about any effort to guide citizens properly.

However dubious Mr. Bloom's view of the American founding is, even more so is his view of the lamentable refounding he in effect sees as having taken place here after the Second World War. Much is made of "the German connection," with Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the like presented as principally responsible for the relativism and the moral and intellectual decline which this country has suffered.³⁰ The dramatics Mr. Bloom relies upon here and elsewhere are critical to his success both as the author of Closing and as a teacher. This is not to deny, however, that he can have a salutary effect upon bright students, in large part because he can and does point them back to the powerful, yet sober and sobering, works of Leo Strauss.

Long before Mr. Bloom first came to the University of Chicago as a college student in the middle 1940s, vigorous criticism could be heard there and elsewhere of the rise of relativism and a related decline in higher education. The developments criticized did not depend upon the European scholars Mr. Bloom makes so much of, who had fled from the Nazis a decade before. When Chief Justice Vinson informed us, in his 1951 opinion affirming the Communist Party leaders' Smith Act convictions, that "nothing is more certain in modern society than the principle that there are no absolutes," he, his colleagues, and their teachers had not been shaped primarily by Nietzsche and the like.³¹ And when Justice Holmes, two generations before, ridiculed any notion of the common law as "a brooding omnipresence in the sky," he drew upon a legal realism movement that went back into the nineteenth century.³²

Much more influential in this country than German thinkers, who continue to find it difficult to make headway against American common sense, has been modern science, especially in physics, astronomy, and biology, subjects about which Mr. Bloom does not pretend to know much.³³ These developments have affected the religious opinions of the American people, just as they have those of others around the world. They have also induced a deep uncertainty in secular thought about man's place in the universe. Nietzsche and Heidegger, among others, have been shaken by the same developments, which go back to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, but have responded to them in ways that the typical American thinker still finds uncongenial.

One obvious consequence of modern science is the remarkable technology harnessed to it. This has led to a steady escalation in the standard of living, an unprecedented personal and social mobility, and the development of all kinds of devices (including birth-control aids) which promote self-gratification and undermine a sense of community. What automobiles and movies began to do to the American community after the First World War, aviation, medicine and television have continued to do in an even more intensive and pervasive form since the Second World War. Indeed, it is an astonishing feature of Closing that so little is said in it about the disastrous effects of television upon American education and upon community life here as in other parts of the world.³⁴ Do not we all know what it has done to the capacity of students to read, to concentrate, and to work? They are much more apt now than they were two generations ago to expect their teachers to entertain them.

A people shaped by television insists upon spectaculars as well as upon instant gratification -- in sports, in politics, and in intellectual experiences -- and it is these debased tastes that Closing, with its cascades of pronouncements on scores of books and authors, caters to. The middle-class book buyers who have been drawn to Mr. Bloom's learned jeremiad find it more congenial to believe that the chronic problems of their children are due to the drugs, music, and sexuality that outsiders have foisted upon them than to blame the television and other such innovations that those parents have been themselves too caught up with to deny to their children. Too much is made of the effects of the universities, and not enough of science and technology (which are fairly independent of the influences of academic life), in the shaping of the American people.

IV.

Whatever the principal influences upon us -- whether modern science, or technology, or thinkers ranging from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger -- they all contribute to one result, a serious questioning of the status of nature among us. Mr. Bloom is too good a student of Leo Strauss not to be aware of how critical the problem of nature is in any effort to understand the modern development.

The merits of The Closing of the American Mind are evident here. Consider how one critic has put his recognition of what the book can surely teach us:

Mr. Bloom reminds us that the present defect of schooling at all levels is basically intellectual. The jumble of "subjects" into which the curriculum has fallen is part of the problem, as is the reduction of learning to psychological adjustment and job skills, rather than the struggle for truth and an underlying understanding of things. And this reduction has not been at odds with what the universities teach, but in line with it, reflecting the chaos of learning which has overtaken them and the low view of human nature which, at least in the social sciences, they have adopted.

Mr. Bloom recalls this for us in trenchant terms that could have been used half a century ago by Robert M. Hutchins, then president of the university at which Mr. Bloom teaches. For the complaint as to higher education in this country is at least as old as that, though Mr. Bloom does not go very far toward acknowledging the fact, and though few writers on the subject have been as eloquent as he in making the case.³⁵

Mr. Bloom, who has been very much (I believe too much) influenced by Rousseau and Nietzsche, is probably most eloquent in depicting the confusion in students' souls and in the souls of many of his colleagues. And there is something commendable in his willingness to speak the truth as he sees it.

Thus the book has become, and is likely to remain for a decade, a convenient symbol of what is wrong in American higher education. It is less likely to be useful as a guide to what can be done about our problems. Even though Closing is not easy to read -- with relatively few readers getting past the sensational exposes, in the opening chapters, of the vagaries of student life -- it may nevertheless help impressionable people begin to respect the study of good books as at least fashionable.

It does contribute to the dramatic character of Mr. Bloom's assault upon established educational prejudices that he should seem much more original, far less derivative, than he is. The soundness of Leo Strauss's thought is testified to, however, in that it can assert itself despite Mr. Bloom's many mistakes, if not wrongheadedness. It has been somewhat sad, nevertheless, to see how bitterly Mr. Strauss has been attacked in some quarters because of this book. I can only hope that some of Mr. Strauss's critics and their readers can be encouraged to go look at "the real thing" rather than settle for the caricature of the Straussian approach to political philosophy that has been conjured up by some reviewers.

In any event, the thoughtful reader who is aware of Mr. Strauss's virtues can better appreciate, as he watches some Straussians carry on, how various of Socrates' naturally ambitious or temperamentally difficult students could be mistaken as products of his teaching. In any event, Mr. Bloom may have sensed that he could "let himself go" as he has in Closing only if he kept Mr. Strauss "literally" out of sight. His mentor here would be Alcibiades. V. One consequence of Mr. Bloom's putting an emphasis upon developments in postwar America is that he can make as much as he does of various sensational episodes in the Sixties, not least the much-publicized disturbances at Cornell University in which he happened to be involved as a member of its government department.

It is odd that so much can be made of student unrest in the Sixties without saying much more than is said in Closing about the effect upon the young of the misconceived, self-destructive, and perhaps unconstitutional American involvement in the war in Indochina. It is silly to neglect a conflict that has had so unfortunate an effect in this country upon the level of patriotism, upon faith in government, and upon respect for a defensible worldwide strategy.³⁶

Also silly is any suggestion that mere self-interest moved students to oppose the draft. This approach fails to appreciate how much the most celebrated instances of resistance to improper governmental actions in Anglo-American constitutional history have taken the form of opposition to demands upon citizens.³⁷ Who knows what would have happened to American resistance in the 1770s if the British government had given in to the American colonists' "self-centered" demand that they be subjected to no taxation without representation? Be that as it may, it is hardly fitting to hear those without military experience of their own berating the young for their reluctance to fight in what seemed to them, and may well have been for us, an unjust war.

Even the "war" that Mr. Bloom does happen to know something about personally -- the Cornell struggle of 1969 -- seems to have been considerably more complex than he makes it out to have been. There is no indication, in Mr. Blooms account of the Cornell Troubles, of the experiences, fears, and concerns of the people, whether students or faculty, who were ranged against the position he passionately supports. It is not appreciated, for example, that some of the more aggressive minority students may have actually believed they were defending themselves.³⁸ Nor is it appreciated how much more dangerous military service could be at that time than life during even the most troubled days on the Cornell campus -- and yet Mr. Bloom is much more sympathetic toward intimidated faculty members than he is toward students disturbed at the prospect of being shipped off to Vietnam.³⁹

All this is not to deny that there was something traumatic for Mr. Bloom in his Cornell experience, so much so that he must be fierce in the way he deals with it two decades later. His account of Cornell, which some consider the best thing in Closing, is the most obviously flawed part of the book. Closing would be far better without its final seventy pages. It is unfortunate when mistreatment, whether in one's childhood or early in ones career, cannot be risen above, if not even made good use of, in ones maturity. Mr. Bloom may be in critical respects a soul with too much, or rather the wrong kind of, longing.⁴⁰

I had occasion to watch close up student sit-ins and the like on several campuses in the Sixties. I found rebellious students usually far more thoughtful, and far more restrained, than Mr. Bloom remembers them. And I could be struck by the unwillingness or inability of many faculty members, even on the University of Chicago campus, to talk with them seriously during one crisis after another. I recall one occasion in Chicago, after the administration and faculty had "broken" a student sit-in, informing the dean of the college, during a chance encounter at a reception in a faculty home, how his students had understood the issues. They have been beaten, I added, and they are at this moment meeting to assess what has happened. I then presumed to advise him that it would be an act of magnanimity, and not without use in reestablishing a proper trust between faculty and students on the campus, if their dean would go to them and treat them in their defeat as an honorable enemy. He would go, he told me, if I would accompany him. We at once left the reception for the student center. But after we entered the building, and just as we got to the door of the meeting hall, I was astonished to watch him fade away without either explanation or apology. It was a most remarkable disappearing act -- and ever after made me skeptical about faculty who proclaimed that they, but not the students, were open to rational discourse."⁴¹

Of course, the students at Cornell may have been different, but I suspect not. I have talked at length with those in a position to know what happened there. If, however, Cornell was as special as Mr. Bloom remembers it, one may well wonder whether it is instructive about what was (or was not) happening elsewhere in this country. In any event, it is difficult to see, even if one accepts Mr. Bloom's no doubt sincere account as completely reliable, that what happened there says much one way or another about modes of education. To see it all, as Mr. Bloom seems to do, as the beginning of what happened to the universities under the Nazis can only be characterized as a perverse kind of wishful thinking.⁴²

VI.

It is also odd that so much can be made of student unrest in the Sixties without saying much more than is said in Closing about the effect upon the young of the civil rights movement. This too bears upon what really went on at Cornell and how students there understood the issues.

Something of Mr. Bloom's limitations in assessing those students may be seen in what he says about what is happening these days to minority students on campuses. He comments adversely on their self-segregation and their failure to take advantage of the opportunities offered them. He does not seem to appreciate how deep-rooted the problems of race relations still are in this country, problems that are bound to be mirrored in campus life.⁴³

Related to his limitations here is his depreciation again and again of feminist efforts. One can see that unfortunate attitudes about minorities and about women are as intermingled in Mr. Bloom as some ideologues believe them generally to be. Here, as elsewhere, it seems that Mr. Bloom cannot help himself, which is an odd state of affairs in one so gifted. This is not to deny that women are finding that the feminist cause is more complicated than they had taken it to be, perhaps even that natural differences between women and men are more critical than some had been led to believe.

Also related to all this is what Mr. Bloom has to say about rock music, which, along with what he has to say about students' sexual relations, has aroused the greatest public interest in the book.⁴⁴ I am persuaded, after discussing Mr. Bloom's account of music with a number of people versed in rock music, including some who do not personally care for it, that he is probably wrong in what he says about what that music is generally like, and what it does to those who listen to it. The redeeming feature of his discussion is, however, that it emphatically reminds us of ancient teachings about the significance of music, and of art generally, in forming the human soul.⁴⁵

I do not challenge the observation that students are much more caught up by overt sensuality than they were in my college generation or in the generation before. But, I suspect, this is not because of special influences upon the young -- such as the music they listen to -- but rather because of that general relaxation of restraints which goes back to the Second World War and because of the general intensification of appeals to the sensual seen in the mass media catering to the adult world. What I as a teenager saw among my young Air Corps comrades during the war has made subsequent student eroticism seem child's play by comparison. All this is complicated by the now fashionable reading of the First Amendment which extends its protection to obscenity and other kinds of expression not anticipated by the framers of the Bill of Rights.

Various of the matters I have touched upon here are also important for raising the question of what nature means in ordering human relations. It is easy if not even mandatory these days for intellectuals to deny the guidance of nature, especially if one overreacts (in the name either of justice or of compassion) to long-standing mistreatment by the community of racial minorities, of women, and of homosexuals. Some conservative critics of Closing believe it does not go far enough, in that it does not extend to the claims of homosexuals the strictures it lays down against the claims of feminists and of racial militants. But I would prefer to see Mr. Bloom become as relaxed about racial minorities and about uppity women as he commendably is about the aggressive homosexuals among us. All three groups will need, for decades to come, respectful sympathy and infommed guidance from the people who dominate public opinion, including those who control higher education.⁴⁶

Vll.

Mr. Bloom's limitations as a reporter of political movements, including of what did happen at Cornell, are suggested by his dismissal of the McCarthy Period as not having had a significant effect in the universities of this country. And yet there is abundant testimony to the contrary, so much so that one must wonder where he was while all that was going on.⁴⁷

The interesting question here is not what was going on -- for that is clear enough -- but rather why Mr. Bloom should have so misapprehended things. It seems to have something to do with his urge to make as much as he does both of his Cornell experience and of "the Gemman connection." One need not deny that the Sixties were important: after all, we are all talking about gender, civil rights, war, and sexual relations in somewhat the way the Sixties taught us to --and that has healthy aspects as well as unhealthy. But the McCarthy Period has also had a lasting effect, partly because the passions it pandered to and the thoughtlessness it encouraged did contribute to American involvement in Vietnam -- and that, in turn, helped make some intellectuals and all too many of the young become irresponsible as citizens.

Student opinion about their teachers in the Sixties was influenced by what was remembered about how faculties had caved in to loyalty forays against the universities a decade before. Faculties, by and large, did stand up to rampaging students in the Sixties much better than they had to governmental intimidation in the Fifties, even though the students had a better cause than did the government inquisitors. But, then, it was considerably more dangerous for professors to resist the inquisitors.⁴⁸

One contribution that the Reagan administration has inadvertently made to a sounder polity is to teach the country that patriotism is not enough, that common sense and a respect for constitutional processes are still needed if government is to conduct itself properly. (The 1987 Iran-Contra revelations were particularly instructive here, especially when it became known that the covert actions resorted to had included supplying arms to the very people in Iran who were partly responsible for killing our Marines in their Beirut barracks.) Perhaps the legacy of the McCarthy Period may finally be working itself out of our system.

It is odd that Mr. Bloom sees Justice Holmes's "clear and present danger" test as exemplifying a "gradual movement away from rights to openness." That is, he does not seem to appreciate that the worst abuses during the McCarthy Period were ratified by judicial recourse to the "clear and present danger" test, not curtailed by it.⁴⁹ This is further testimony to Mr. Bloom's limitations in his efforts to describe and assess the practices as well as the principles of the American regime both at this time and at its founding.⁵⁰

Epilogue

Various chance factors have combined to make The Closing of the American Mind soar as it has. The immediate ground from which it took off was prepared by the Reagan administration before the shameful Iran-Contra revelations sapped its vitality. The book appeals in large part to those who "know" that there is something really wrong with the young, with racial minorities, with homosexuals, with feminists, and with the unpatriotic (especially among intellectuals). It also appeals, and properly so, to those who have been told repeatedly, for several generations now, about the shortcomings of American higher education.

There was a golden age in American higher education when Allan Bloom, as a fifteen-year-old, first came to the University of Chicago -- but that was principally due to the presence on campuses of large numbers of older men who had served several years in a proper war and who were serious about an education. Perhaps, indeed, nothing would contribute more to the seriousness of higher education today than the general requirement of a few years of high-minded national service immediately after high school.

Be that as it may, American students in the best universities may still be better, in that they are more open to radical intellectual challenge, than their European counterparts. It should at once be added that the universities in this country, if they are to continue to enjoy the massive public support they need to survive, have to provide many programs in addition to the finest training in the liberal arts that relatively few students can make much use of. The best prospects for liberal education remain in the small colleges of this country, whether standing alone or as more or less autonomous parts of universities.

Although chance has been critical in making Mr. Bloom a wealthy celebrity, it is a fate he is as much entitled to as any scholar of our generation. He, like the great Protagoras, does work at his calling and he is known as an eloquent champion of those privileged to study with him. I still recall the considerable pleasure he had, and that his friends shared, when he got his contract to translate the Republic.⁵¹ Indeed, I know no one among the academics with whom I have been associated for four decades now who would enjoy spending the fortune he is making as much as Mr. Bloom is likely to, and who would be less corrupted in the process.

It would give Allan Bloom's friends considerable pleasure if he could now take his loot, invest it conservatively, and live quite comfortably ever after while taking care of his health better than he ever has, curtailing sharply his oppressively lucrative lecture schedule, and returning to a serious study, with the help of Leo Strauss, of the Bible and the Greek texts which lie at the roots of all that he properly stands for.⁵²