1This story is adapted from Leo Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish (New York McGraw-Hill, 1968), p. 173. See, for a eulogy of the spiritual prototype for the hero of this story, Anastaplo, The Artist as Thinker: From Shakespeare to Joyce (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press / Ohio University Press, 1983), pp. 270-71. See also note 45 below. See, on the Establishment-minded kibitzer in this story, note 48 below. Notes
The reader is urged, as with my other publications, to begin by reading the text of this review without reference to its notes.
2We have here a variation upon an ancient Cretan paradox.
The full title of Mr. Bloom's book is The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). The book is described in this fashion by the New Yorker (July 6, 1987, p. 82):
This essay, whose author is a political philosopher at the University of Chicago, argues that American universities have yielded intellectual and moral authority to the point where their students are not taught values, and are not even allowed to discover them. Because the traditional curriculum has been eroded, undergraduates have little chance to understand the ideas that shaped the past, and the result is that they do not learn to think coherently about the present. This process may be described, at least in part, as good intentions gone awry: post-Second World War faculties, attempting inclusiveness, taught tolerance, drifted into a pervasive relativism, and left themselves without any intellectual foundation for moral judgment. At present, the author finds the university compartmentalized: science departments are enclaves of self-importance, the humanities faculties "do not believe in themselves or what they do"; and political science is "a haphazard bazaar." He allows his readers to decide whether the disarray of our learned institutions represents or misrepresents the condition of the wider society.
3See, for what can be said on behalf of Judge Bork, Anastaplo, "On the Judging of Judges: The Bork Case," University of Chicago Maroon, Oct. 6, 1987, p. 21.
4Among the fine publications by Mr. Bloom's former students have been meticulous translations of Greek texts: Plato's Laws, by Thomas L. Pangle (Free Press); Aristotle's Politics, by Carnes Lord (University of Chicago Press); Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito, and Aristophanes' Clouds, by Thomas G. West (Cornell University Press). The Pangle translation of the Laws is dedicated to Mr. Bloom.
Various of Mr. Bloom's former students like Closing because it reads the way they fondly remember him in his lecture courses.
5See Allan Bloom (with Harry V. Jaffa), Shakespeare's Politics (New York Basic Books, 1964). This book is dedicated by Mr. Bloom and Mr. Jaffa "To Leo Strauss, Our Teacher." See Commentary, July 1987, p. 14.
6See Allan Bloom, trans., Plato, The Republic (New York Basic Books, 1968). See note 9 below. This translation is dedicated by Mr. Bloom to his mother and father.
7See Allan Bloom, trans., Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile: or, On Education (New York Basic Books, 1979). This translation is dedicated by Mr. Bloom, "To the memory of Victor Baras, My Student and Friend." It was anticipated by the Bloom translation, Politics and the Arts: Rousseau's Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theater (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960). Closing is dedicated by Mr. Bloom, "To My Students."
8See Allan David Bloom, The Political Philosophy of Isocrates (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1955).
9See, on Leo Strauss, Anastaplo, The Artist as Thinker, pp. 250-72. See also Laurence Berns, "Aristotle and the Moderns on Freedom and Equality," in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer, eds., The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 148. Mr. Strauss is drawn upon at length in the interpretive essay in the Bloom translation of Plato's Republic. See note 6 above.
10Closing was on the New York Times best-seller list for almost a year after it first appeared there on April 26, 1987. It reached the top of the list on June 7, 1987, remaining there for ten weeks. See Publishers Weekly, July 3, 1987, p. 26. In May 1988 Closing appeared on the paperback best-seller list for what promises to be an extended stay. George Plimpton has suggested that Closing was pushed to the top of the best-seller list largely because of the introduction that Saul Bellow provided for it. Donna Rifkind, "Literary Logrolling as Art," Wall Street Journal, May 24, 1988, p. 26. See note 12 below. Compare note 40 below.
11See, e.g., David Reiff, "The Colonel and the Professor," Times Literary Supplement, Sept. 4, 1987, p. 950; Robert Paul Wolff, book review, Academe, September-October 1987, p. 64; Martha Nussbaum, "Undemocratic Vistas," New York Review of Books, Nov. 5, 1987, p. 20; Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Allan in Wonderland," Cross Currents, Winter 1987, p. 477. See also Jacob Weisberg, "The Cult of Leo Strauss: An obscure philosopher's Washington disciples," Newsweek, Aug 3, 1987, p. 61; note 29 below. Consider as well Mortimer J. Adler's appearance on William F. Buckley, Jr.'s "Firing Line,'' #1739, aired on PBS the week of May 27, 1988.
An eminent classical scholar is reported in a New York Times Magazine article on Mr. Bloom as having denounced Leo Strauss as "a bloody lunatic." (James Atlas, "Chicago's Grumpy Guru," Jan. 3, 1988, p. 25.) Far more fair as well as instructive, is the tribute paid to Mr. Strauss by the same classical scholar on another occasion when the auspices were far more favorable. Mr. Strauss could then be remembered by him as "a man of extraordinary mental power with a kind of fantasy of the intellect, creative, almost like a poet. . . . He cared about thoughts and their life and their relations to books and to the world with a white-hot intensity." See Anastaplo, The Artist as Thinker p. 272.
12There is only one reference to Mr. Strauss by name, and that is really a quotation by Mr. Strauss from Winston Churchill to the effect that "the moderns 'built on low but solid ground."' Closing, p. 167. All kinds of other people are acknowledged by Mr. Bloom in his preface, including old students, readers, and typists. Of Saul Bellow, who contributed a most helpful foreword to Closing, Mr. Bloom can say, "[He], with his special generosity, entered into my thoughts and encouraged me in paths I had never before taken." Closing, p. 23. See note 10 above, note 15 below.
The informed reader expects Mr. Strauss finally to emerge from the survey of political philosophy in Mr. Bloom's long chapter, "From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rektoratsrede," especially since it concludes with the "study of the problem of Socrates [as] the one thing most needful." Closing, p. 310. If anyone emerges here, however, it is Mr. Bloom himself. (Elsewhere it is Woody Allen. See Closing, pp. 125, 144-46, 154, 155, 173.) Mr. Strauss's last public lecture at the University of Chicago, on Dec. 1,1967 was on "The Socratic Question." See Anastaplo, The Artist as Thinker, pp. 259-62. The problem of Socrates was repeatedly investigated by Mr. Strauss in his studies of Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon.
13Mr. Bloom took his University of Chicago doctorate with the Committee on Social Thought, an interdisciplinary body sponsored by Robert Maynard Hutchins as president of the University. Mr. Bloom began his teaching career at the University of Chicago in the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults, founded by Mr. Hutchins, Cyril Houle, and Mortimer J. Adler and rejuvenated by Maurice F. X. Donohue. Compare Closing, pp. 54, 70. See note 51 below.
14See, e.g. University of Chicago Magazine, Summer 1987, p. 9 ("I'm a Hutchins enthusiast without believing that that was the only way or even perhaps the right way"); Washington Post, June 18, 1987, p. C2. See note 51 below. Mr. Bloom can also speak with respect of teaches such as Yves R. Simon (whose essay "Introduction to the Study of Practical Wisdom" may be found in the 1988 volume of Great Ideas Today) and institutions such as St. Johns College. See, e.g. Eugene Kennedy, "The Scholar Who Made Education a Best Seller," New York Times, Education Life, Aug 2, 1987, p. 36.
15Is there not something Heideggerian, and thus questionable, about such self-assertiveness? The demands of the market might also have been responsible for making so much in Closing of the supposed intellectual influences upon Mr. Bloom of celebrities that Mr. Strauss could hardy have taken seriously. See note 12 above, note 51 below.
See, on Martin Heidegger, Anastaplo, The Artist as Thinker, pp. 269, 475.
16This may be related to the implicit depreciation of politics in Mr. Bloom's approach. "Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to societv " Closing, p/ 245. Consider, also, ibid., p 336: "The importance of [his college] years for an American cannot be overestimated. They are civilization's only chance to get to him." Compare ibid., p. 39: "The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature." See also ibid., p. 97. Compare note 49 below.
A depreciation of the political may be implicit as well in Mr. Bloom's initial response to the Universtiy of Chicago campus: "When I was fifteen years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life. I had never before seen, or at least had not noticed, buildings that were evidently dedicated to a higher purpose, not to necessity or utility, not merely to shelter or manufacture or trade, but to something that might be an end in itself. The Middle West was not known for the splendor of its houses of worship or its monuments to political glory." Closing, p. 243. Thus, it seems, he had not appreciated the majestic aspirations of Midwestern county courthouses or the significance of Civil War and other such monuments across the land. Particularly memorable is the rather insistent Indiana Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Mr. Bloom's native Indianapolis. See note 22 below,
17See Anastaplo, The Artist as Thinker, p. 259.
18See Closing, pp. 66, 285. Compare ibid., pp. 274, 327. Compare, also, Plato, Apology 28C-D, Crito 44B, Republic 516D-E; Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist; Notes on the First Amendment (Dallas, Texas Southern Methodist University Press, 1971), p. 278; Anastaplo, Human Being and Citizen: Essays on Virtue, Freedom and the Common Good (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), p. 240, n. 32, pp. 242-43, n. 39.
19"Aristotle said that man has two peaks, each accompanied by intense pleasure: sexual intercourse and thinking." Closing, p. 137. Compare note 9 above.
20See Closing, pp. 330-31; also, ibid., pp 110-12, 162-70, 174-77. See, as well, ibid., pp. 28, 97, 187. Compare note 9 above.
21See Closing, pp 271, 283. Mr. Strauss could speak with passion of "what it means to be a son of the Jewish people -- of the 'am 'olam -- to have one's roots deep in the oldest past and to be committed to a future beyond all futures." Anastaplo, The Artist as Thinker, p. 271. He could invoke as well, in a time of mourning, "the traditional Jewish formula 'May God comfort you among the others who mourn for Zion and Jerusalem.' " Ibid., p. 271. Mr. Bloom's uses of religion in Closing verge on the sentimental in some instances and on the supersophisticated in others. Neither is the proper response. Compare, however, Closing, p. 60.
See, on the relation of revelation to reason, Anastaplo, "Church and State Explorations," 19 Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 61 (l987), 183-93.
22See Closing, pp 302-3. Goethe's text has four stages, not only the three drawn upon here by Mr. Bloom. It is nicely revealing that Mr. Bloom should convert the meditating Faust's "meaning" (or "sense') into "feeling" and that he should omit altogether "force" (or "strength") from Faust's inventory. Thus, it can be said, Mr. Bloom's depreciation of politics is instinctive, so much so as to subvert his usual meticulousness as a translator. See note 16 above, notes 42 and 47 below.
23See Closing, pp 41, 306, 308. Compare Gisela N. Berns, Greek Antiquity in Schiller's Wallenstein (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985,\
24I must reiterate that Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche are thinkers of the very highest order . . . We must relearn what this means and also that there are others who belong in the same rank." Closing, p. 240. See also ibid., pp. 290 ("The great modern philosophers were as much philosophers as were the ancients''), 307-8, 377. Mr. Strauss believed Plato and Aristotle "of the very highest order." Would not those thinkers who misread Plato and Aristotle be of a lower order, including Nietzsche and his predecessors? See Anastaplo, "On How Eric Vogelin Has Read Plato and Aristotle," 1986-87 Independent Journal of Philosophy (forthcomingl
25Mr. Bloom peruses to dull the rhetorical impressiveness of his arguments with qualifications because he, like his stylish master Rousseau, is more interested in leading his readss to feel the power of his positions than in protecting himself in advance from criticism. But unlike his master, Mr. Bloom seems to believe that a people, or life itself, can be significant only in or through the study of books. (There may be something nihilistic about this. See the text at note 29 below ) Compare the experience of Sparta, which is not remembered for books.
Eva Brann, of St. Johns College, has published a review of Closing which may come to be celebrated as the best response to the book. 38 St. Johns Review 71 (1988). It should have a most salutary effect, not least because of its restraint. Among much else, Miss Brann has this to say:
The Closing of the American Mind is, I am implying, a historicist enterprise or, more fairly next cousin to it. Since historicism, the notion that the temporal place of a text determines its significance more than does the author's conscious intention and that history through its movements is a real agent, is Mr. Bloom's bete noir, this is no small charge. But there is no getting around the fact that the book continually places and positions great names evaluatively from the outside in -- of internal philosophical substance it contains very little. Similarly it persistently sums up the spirit of the times and seeks its genealogy in intellectual movements . . .Further on Miss Brann makes these judgments:The title itself is revealing. It is, to be sure, not Mr. Bloom's choice. He wanted the euphonious and accurate title "Souls Without Longing" (the French title is "L'Ame desarmee"). But he condoned "The Closing of the American Mind." The "Closing" part is fine: one of the most convincing chapters is the early one in which he shows how openness corrupted, which becomes the lazily tolerant path of least resistance, forecloses passionate doubting, and how the springboard of learning is vigorous prejudice. But "the American Mind" is debased Hegelianism, and a scandal. Americans do, happily, still have certain areas of consensus; nonetheless, they have more than one mind among them. Ibid., pp. 75-6.
The text seems to be stuffed with truth that is not the whole truth and not nothing but the truth. Of course it is very hard to hit all the small nails squarely on the head with so large a mallet, yet there are fine and there are coarse ways of epitomizing spheres of thought and trends of opinion. Mr. Bloom's often anonymous and torrential mode of presentation makes it hard to tell whether the trouble is with his accuracy or his perspective. Moreover, he sometimes seems to present an anonymous modern opinion as though it had but to come in contact with the air to self-destruct, while his great moderns, Rosseau and Nietzsche, seem somehow to merit awed admiration for setting us on the road we are condemned for following. Mr. Bloom's relation especially to Rousseau is the mystery of mysteries to me. One of the excellences of his exposition is the continual pointing to Rousseau not just as the uncannily accurate analyst but as the brilliantly effective originator of the corruption-prone side of modernity. (The book neglects to its detriment the complementary side, the reverence-producing splendor of modern science and mathematics). But then why is Mr. Bloom not on record as being at least as repelled as he is fascinated by this "inverse Socrates"?Ibid., p. 77. Mr. Blowns considerable use of Tocqueville as a guide to understanding American life may reflect the influence upon Tocqueville of Rousseau. Furthermore, Mr. Bloom has become habituated to seeing American things through European eyes. Miss Brann describes Closing as "a tract on the love of the love of wisdom." Ibid., p. 78. The current dispute about "elitism" is touched upon in what Miss Brann has to say about her "conviction that people one by one have in them, besides sound sense, the roots of reflection." Ibid., p. 73. See Jacob Klein, A Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965).Also instructive are the resevations in Miss Brann's review about the theory of the relation of music to the passions that Mr. Bloom finds in Plato's Republic. Ibid., pp 78-9.
See the text at note 40 below, and the text at note 45 below. See also note 33 below. See, as well, Eva Brann, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
26Mr. Strauss's care in writing (but not in preparing indexes for his books) reflected his care in reading. See, e.g. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952). Too much has been made both by some of Mr. Strauss's students and by some of his critics of his discovery about how a decent deception may have to be resorted to on occasion by the prudent man. See, e.g. Benjamin Barber, "The Philosopher Despot: Allan Bloom's elitist agenda," Harper's Magazine, January 1988, p. 61; Richard Rorty, "Straussianism, democracy and Allan Bloom, I.: That Old-Time Philosophy," New Republic, April 4, 1988, p. 28. Compare Matthew 10:16.
27Carl Van Doran, the historian.
28See, e.g. Leo Strauss, Natural Rght and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953); p. 1. Compare, e.g., Bloom, Closing, pp. 28, 163-64, 187. But see note 16 above.
29See the reviews of Closing by Harry V. Jaffa and Harry Neumann to be published in Interpretation (vol. 16, 1988). Compare the friendlier reviews to be published there by William A. Galston, Roger D. Masters, and Will Morrisey. Some of the unfriendly reviews (see, e.g., note 11 above) have been poorly informed, if not simply unfair.
In his discussion of "Nihilism, American Style" (Closing, pp. 139f.), Mr. Bloom seems to complain that American nihilism has not gone as far as the European original. The "shallowness" of the United States here may reflect a certain resiliency grounded in a sounder political system than any enjoyed by continental Europeans. See note 25 above.
30Qualified support for Mr. Bloom here may be found in Strauss, Natural Right and History, pp. 1-2.
31See Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494, at 508 (1951). See, on Dennis, Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist, p. 824.
32See Anastaplo, The U S Constitution of 1787: A Commentary (to be published in 1989 by the Johns Hopkins University Press), Lectures no. 10 and no. 11 (originally published in 18 Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 15 [1986]). Compare the "absolutes" drawn upon in the Declaration of Independence as well as by William Blackstone. See, for the most instructive account of what the United States Supreme Court has done to its intended common-law powers, William W. Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States (Chicago: Universitv of Chicago Press, 1953). See, on Mr. Crosskey as a master teacher, Anastaplo, "Mr. Crosskey, the American Constitution, and the Natures of Things" 15 Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 181(19831 See also Malcolm P. Sharp, "Crosskey, Anastaplo and Meiklejohn on the United States Constitution," University of Chicago Law School Record, Spring 1973, p. 3.
33Mr. Bloom's attempts to make use of mathematics are not happy ones. See Closing, pp. 127, 137. See also note 25 above. I suspect that he also could have made better use of Freud than he does. See note 40 below.
34See, for an extended argument for the abolition of broadcast television in the United States, Anastaplo, "Self-Government at the Mass Media: A Practical Man's Guide," in Harry M. Clot, ed., The Mass Media and Modern Democracy (Chicago: Rand McNally College Pub. Co., 1974), p. 161. Key questions remain, such as, Why have we permitted television to do all that it has done to us? What does the ever expanding medical crusade really minister to in us? See Anastaplo, "On Death: One by One, Yet All Together," in Human Being and Citizen, p. 214.
35John Van Doran, "Mr. Bloom, the American Mind, and Paideia," The Paideia Bulletin, November-December 1987, p. 1. See, on Mr. Hutchins and his efforts to reform liberal education at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, Mortimer J. Adler, Philosopher at Large (New York: Macmillan, 1977), p. 343. See also Anastaplo, "Jacob Klein of St. John's College," The Newsletter, Politics Department, University of Dallas, Spring 1979, pp. 7-8.
36See, e.g., Anastaplo, "Preliminary Reflections on the Pentagon Papers," University of Chicago Magazine, January-February 1972, p. 2, March-April 1972, p. 16 (reprinted in 118 Congressional Record 24990 [July 24, 1972]).
37See Closing, pp. 328-29. Organized campus resistance to the draft in the Sixties included among its numbers many students who were personally exempt (that is, women and the better male students). See, on opposition to the draft and the earliest important First Amendment case (Schenck v. United States [1919]), Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist, p. 826.
38See, e.g. Ietter from Barbara Page, New York Times Magazine, Jan. 24, 1988, p. 8. Allan P. Sindler, a former Cornell colleague whom Mr. Bloom has properly praised (Closing, p. 23), prepared, in 1969 and 1971, accounts of the 1969 Cornell disturbances which are considerably more balanced than is Mr. Bloom's. (I have read only the manuscript versions of Mr. Sindler's accounts.) See note 39 and 42 below. See, for a novel evidently drawing on some Cornell disturbances, Alison Lurie, The War Between the Tates (New Boric Random House, 1974).
39Consider how an unfriendly critic can comment upon such different responses:
Among [Mr. Bloom's] various occasions for nostalgia is the good old Western movie, which people used to watch without a bunch of anti-racist and anti-sexist considerations spoiling their enjoyment. Yet he also recounts an incident that deeply troubled him (and, indeed, seems to have been the point of departure for the book itself): one day he was among a group of professors who were threatened at gunpoint by a group of "revolutionary" students. I share his indignation, of course; yet I cannot help noticing his reluctance to profit from this unique opportunity actually to take part in a Western himself.Tzvetan Todorov, "The Philosopher and the Everyday," New Republic, Sept. 14 & 21, 1987, p. 34.I have been told, by a thoughful woman who was a student at Cornell during the 1969 disturbances and who engaged in the marathon meetings among students then, that she and her friends had felt betrayed by those faculty members who resigned their posts and left them to cope with the radical minority on campus. (This woman had herself been raised in an academic family on another university campus.) I myself believed at the time that the Cornell resignations (among which was Professor Sindler's) were a mistake, but it is difficult to judge such maneuvers from a distance. But I also recall that this did not keep me from letting it be known, as chairman of the political science department at Rosary College, that I was willing to do everything I could to help one or more of those who had resigned and who might have been in need of a temporary academic refuge. See note 41 and 42 below.
40A serious study of Mr. Blooms book could well begin with his considerable use of the word longing. See, e.g. Closing, pp. 62, 125, 133, 134, 135, 157, 167, 169, 196, 205, 206, 243, 282, 320, 329. See also note 25 and 33 above, note 52 below. (He is correct in pointing out the questionable implications of the use of such terms as values and commitment. See, e.g. Closing, p. 194f. But notice Mr. Strauss's reference to commitment in the passage quoted in note 21 above.)
The curious blending in Mr. Bloom's soul of longing with anger may help explain his success with the national reading (or, at least, book-buying) public; there are in Closing the vibrations of one tormented soul that resonate in others. Gifted students can be moved by him, even to the extent of telling him things that they would not tell their other teachers. These may include things that are not quite so but which they sense he somehow wants to hear. They are moved much more by longings than he appreciates.
41When students want to stop ineffectual life on a campus, they usually can do so. We probably do not want schools that are completely unresponsive to students or that are altogether invulnerable to student activity. This is not to deny that there was periodic grass irresponsibility if not even a kind of intermittent lunacy, on campuses during the Sixties. But it does not help to be so dogmatic as not to recognize the serious questions that students could raise and that faculties and administrations failed to address properly. One of the sadder aspects of the Sixties was the loss of confidence by faculties in their ability to guide students with respect to controversial matters. See Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist, p. 409; Anastaplo, Human Being and Citizen, p. 263, n. 9; Anastaplo, "The Daring of Moderation: Student Power and The Melian Dialogue," 78 School Review 451 (August 1970). See also note 39 above. Compare Wayne C. Booth, Now Don't Try to Reason With Me (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 175, 217-23, 225, 243-61.
42For one thing, the Cornell students were not acting in concert with, but rather in opposition to, govemment policy. Nor were they simply the mob that Mr. Bloom condemns: there, as generally elsewhere on campuses, the extreme elements were effectively restrained by the bulk of the student body. Compare the odd recourse by a few of Mr. Bloom's students to passing out to the mob quotations from Plato, a tactic that he finds admirable. See Closing, pp. 332-33. See also note 39 above.
Mr. Sindler's meticulous accounts of the Cornell disturbances (see note 38 above) is far more political than Mr. Bloom's recollection. I suspect that any poor judgment and cowardice displayed at Cornell by the administration and all too many faculty had liffle to do with the corrupting educational theories Mr. Bloom makes so much of in this context. Administrations and faculty laboring under the same educational theories did handle themselves much better elsewhere. See, for possible corrections of Mr. Bloom's account (if not also of Mr. Sindler's account), Cornell Alumni News, November 1987, pp. 28-31.
The concluding paragraph of Mr. Sindler's 1971 account is instructive (pp. 84 and 85):
This account of how crisis came to Cornell suggests, I hope, the lengthy evolution and multidimensionality of the campus conflict, and the mix of motives and attitudes -- creditable and otherwise -- of the major actors. It thus provides but a thin understanding to rest the explanation on the existence and effects of a wobbly and irresolute administration, a divided and unnerved faculty and a confused and exploitable student body. These characterizations are accurate enough, but it was the reasons for the wobbliness, division and confusion in the face of the clearly illegitimate methods of dissent which illuminate Cornell's difficulties and those facing many other campuses around the nation. The malaise of higher education, the declining self-confidence of academic men, the shattered consensus on academic values and the relation of the university to society, the bias of faculty in favor of the political Left, the conversion of white racial guilt and empathy to blacks to a quite different posture of abdicating judgment and "giving blacks what they want," the growing casuistry of liberals in condoning bad means when used by favored groups or on behalf of ends thought good -- all these complex themes and more comprise the contextual set of larger reasons necessary to explain Cornell's difficulties in reacting effectively to internal campus threats to fundamental university principles. If liberal administrators and faculty persist in crippling their capacity to respond to these threats because of a self-inflicted paralysis of judgment and will, the verdict of one black Cornellian on the great April crisis may come to apply to higher education generally. "Liberals . . . ," he shrewdly observed, "serv[ed] as liberalism's pallbearers."Also instructive would be a Sindleresque review of Mr. Bloom's Closing. See note 39 above.43The 1954 United States Supreme Court opinion in Brown v. Board of Education was an important step toward a humane solution of the problems of race relations in this country, but we still have a way to go. Mike Royko, who can be hardheaded (if not even cvnical) about American politics, insists that "racial discrimination . . . is the most destructive and persistent of our domestic problems. Name any of our urban miseries -- poverty, crime, unemployment, education, housing -- and it boils down to race. Add up the cost, not only in dollars, but in fear and distrust, and the bottom line is race." Chicago Tribune, March 23, 1988, sec. 1, p. 3. See, for reservations about typical "black studies" programs, Anastaplo, "Race, Law and Civilization," in Human Being and Citizen, p. 175.
Be this as it may, a psychic and intelledual prototype for Allan Bloom in various respects is James Baldwin. See, e.g., Baldwin, "The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American," in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. (New York: Delta Books, 1962), p. 3.
44It is this material that Mr. Bloom's editors evidentdy insisted should be moved to the front of the book. One risk of massive editorial revisions is the sloppiness of a poor "fit" between a book's parts by people who do not really know what they are doing.
45 Compare the end of note 25 above. It is true that music is very important for the young today -- but also is for Mr. Bloom himself, if one is to judge from repeated reports in the press of the fabulous library of recordings that he can now own. I doubt, however, that the pleasure he gets from all this music today matches the enjoyment he derived from the performance more than three decades ago of the joyful dirge. "There'll be no room for gloom in Bloom's Republic." (The words, and performance at a Basic Program symposium, were by Jason Aronson and Werner Dannhauss. The music was borrowed from My Fair Lady. See Closing, p. 310, n. 9; note 1 above; note 51 below.)
"Even Secretary of Education William J. Bennett, a Bloom admirer, thinks he is a little harsh on old man rock. 'Bloom has eloquently and forcefully dissected the failures of institutions of higher education and pointed the way toward fundamental reforms. But Bloom and I differ on one important point: rock 'n' roll. I'm for it, though only the old-fashioned kind.' " Deirdre Donahue, "A scholar tries to open our minds," USA Today, July 21, 1987, p. 2D.
Some rock music is far worse than Mr. Bloom reports it. And probably all of it suffers from being technically inferior to the great music of old. Be that as it may, the typical teenaged response to Closing is suggested by this passage from a review in a high school newspaper: "But to this teenaged rock listener, Professor Bloom's arguments are just too extreme. He writes as if rock corrupts every child in America. His ideas about how rock relates to sex are more vulgar than any video on MTV he criticizes." U-High Midway (University of Chicago Laboratory Schools). Sept 16, 1987, p. 2.
Consider, also, Frances Hannett, "The Haunting Lyric: The Personal and Social Significance of American Popular Songs," 33 Psychoanalytic Quarterly 226 (1964). Dr. Hannett suggests,
The poignant and haunting quality of the Iyrics and tunes [of "hit" songs] reveals the prevalence of a depressive mood in American society during the last half century. It seems that the sales appeal of popular songs of this period is not to be found in their sex appeal but rather in their experience of the depressive mood or of correctives for it.Mr. Bloom is anticipated, in what he says not onlv about music but also about the epistemological errors responsible for the failings generally of higher education, by Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). In Mr. Weaver's day, however, jazz was the bete noir, not rock. See, on Mr. Weaver, Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist, p. 822.46See, e.g. Anastaplo, The Artist as Thinker, p. 477. "It is an age of pious bullies in America, and far too many people are having far too good a time beating up on the young, the poor, the defeated." Reiff, "The Colonel and the Professor," p. 960.
47See, e.g., Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist, p 409; "Wnat Is Still Wrong With George Anastaplo? A Sequel to 366 U.S. 82 (1961)," 35 DePaul Law Review 551, 595-609, 643-47 (1986). See also Ellen W. Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New Boric Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 340-41 (the final paragraph of the book):
The academy did not fight McCarthyism. It contributed to it. The dismissals, the blacklists, and above all the almost universal acceptance of the legitimacy of what the congressional committees and other official investigators were doing conferred respectability upon the most repressive elements of the anti-Communist crusade. In its collaboration with McCarthyism, the academic community behaved just like every other major institution in American life. Such a discovery is demoralizing, for the nation's colleges and universities have traditionally encouraged higher expectations. Here, if anywhere, there should have been a rational assessment of the nature of American Communism and a refusal to overreact to the demands for its eradication. Here, if anywhere, dissent should have found a sanctuary. Yet it did not. Instead, for almost a decade until the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war inspired a new wave of activism there was no real challenge to political orthodoxy on the nation's campuses. The academy's enforcement of McCarthyism had silenced an entire generation of radical intellectuals and snuffed out all meaningful opposition to the official version of the Cold War. When, by the late Fifties, the hearings and dismissals tapered off, it was not because they encountered resistance but because they were no longer necessary. All was quiet on the academic front.See also Harvey Klehr, book review, Academic Questions, Spring 1988, p. 82. It should be noticed as well that there have been times and places, since the Fifties, when pro-McCarthy academics have suffered for their opinions. Even so, Mr. Blooms dismissal of the effects of "McCarthyism" in the universities may be still another indication of his lack of a reliable "feel" for politics. See note 22 above. Compare Mr. Bloom's instructive review of I. E. Stone's The Trial of Socrates in the Washington Post, Feb. 14, 1988.
A much more engaging aspect of Mr. Stone's capacities is provided in Andrew Patner, I. E. Stone: A Portrait (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). See also, on "McCarthyism," Harry Kalven, Jr., A Worthy Tradition (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
48 That is, professors could figure out what was in their interests or at least what seemed to be in their immediate (however ignoble) interest. See, e.g. Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist, p. 333; Anastaplo, "A Progress Report," National Law Journal, June 18, 1979, p. 33, at note 24 in that text. See also note 1 above and the epigraph for this book review.
49See Closing, pp. 28, 260. See, for my discussions of the "clear and present danger" test (including Alexander Meiklejohn's pioneering critique of it), Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist, pp. 812, 818. See also note 32 above.
50It is unfortunate that Mr. Bloom, who does love his country, should lead outsiders to conclude, "The odd thing is that Bloom doesn't seem actually to like America. Indeed, when it comes time for him to describe anything about the place, he speaks only in what might be called that new grammatical mood invented by neo-conservatives; the denunciative." Rieff, "The Colonel and the Professor," p. 960. Compare note 16 above.
Mr. Bloom can notice, "A Charles de Gaulle or, for that matter, an Alexander Solzhenitsyn sees the United States as a mere aggregate of individuals, a dumping ground for refuse from other places devoted to consuming; in short, no culture." Closing, p. 187. Such an observation does call for the immediate comment that people such as de Gaulle have again and again depended upon the United States to save them from the political disasters that their supposedly superior cultures have helped produce. See also Closing, p. 77.
51This was while a dozen of Mr. Strauss's students, including Mr. Bloom, were teaching in the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago. See note 13 and 15 above. See, on the Basic Program, Anastaplo, "What is a Classics," in The Artist as Thinker; p. 284. See also Anastaplo "The Teacher as Learner On Discussion," Claremont Review of Books, Summer 1985, p. 22.
It is reassuring that Mr. Bloom is not, in his critique of higher education, as original as he may seem to many of his readers to be. That is, there are models, experiments, and experiences "out there" for conscientious educators to draw upon in attempting the reforms that have long been needed. Among the things to be considered is, of course, "the old Great Books conviction." See Closing, pp. 51, 344. See also Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., "Democracy and the Great Books," New Republic, April 4, 1988, p. 33; Closing, p. 287.
52Another way of putting this is to say that Mr. Bloom's next book should be one that Simon and Schuster would not want to publish. No doubt, it is difficult to avoid being trapped by one's phenomenal success by what the world comes to expect of one, by the honors and lavish rewards it seems to offer. When that happens, the human being can be lost sight of.
The classics do teach us that whoever happens to be elevated by chance is especially vulnerable to being toppled thereby. Such a prospect can be particularly distressing for anyone who is congenitally apprehensive. One's defensiveness then can become so immoderate and provocative as to invite attacks. That is, it very much matters what kind of a soul one develops early in life. See the text at note 40 above.
In any event, I have observed in the prologue to this review that we see great success turn into a curse in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos. In his Oedipus at Colonus we can see that the long-suffering Oedipus, of worldwide fame, virtually became a thing (to be manipulated by others) because of what had happened to him. In his case, however, we can also see that an appalling curse somehow became a blessing.
Mr. Bloom observes that "it is always pleasant to give people gifts that please them." Closing, p. 69. Proper pleasure comes from giving people the gifts that should please them. What more can Mr. Bloom do now to please his true friends than to use, and hence preserve, both body and soul as he should?