Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. Simon & Schuster New York 1987. NF;5/26.

I remember reading this soon after it was published (and me being less than a decade away from university) and being impressed. Rereading it now I thought might let me see what time passing and things like the Internet, AI, and more intense separation of the right and left have done to Bloom’s ideas. The ideas still make sense to me. What has changed a lot is what Dr Bloom was worried about: higher education.

Dr Bloom was talking about something that in the 1980s he felt was being irretrievably lost in universities, where he worked.

The kinds of questions children ask: Is there a God? Is there freedom? Is there punishment for evil deeds? Is there certain knowledge? What is a good society? were once also the questions addressed by science and philosophy. But now the grownups are too busy at work, and the children are left in a day-care center called the humanities, in which the discussions have no echo in the adult world.

What was or is that something? Bloom summarizes the questions in the above quote as “What is man (The gender issue hadn’t yet arrived)?” He refers to people’s “highest aspirations as opposed to (their) low and common needs” and says:

A liberal education means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern.

I hope and believe that the importance of “continuous concern” with what humans are (what I am) hasn’t gone away at all. It’s just changed locations.

That change was ghoing on as something blew into universities in the 1960s. The consequences were still around 20 years later as Dr Bloom was writing. That everything is relative had in his opinion replaced the search for a good life, which is real. Students had became preoccupied with indiscriminateness because its opposite was discrimination. Language had changed and become trivialized so talk that used to be applied to great artists, philosophers, and writers was now being applied to every schoolchild. Writers seriously studied by the 1970s were Norman O Brown (“Love’s Body”) and Charles Reich (“The Greening of America”. Courses like “Man in Nature”, “War and Moral Responsibility” and “Culture and the Individual” replaced traditional Philosophy and English Literature. Politics and the general culture had changed too. Emphasis on racism and the belief that the founding of the United States was racist, and the necessity for affirmative action (Bloom believed that blacks didn’t like whites doing them favours). Sex had “a short day in the sun before it had to be reined in to accommodate the feminist sensibility”. All this was closing, as opposed to opening, the American mind according to Bloom. At least in universities.

I was in university in the 1960s at UBC in Vancouver. The winds of change were blowing but hadn’t yet made the difference they were going to. There was a heterogeneous mix of the changes Bloom would be on about in 1987, and traditional study of the humanities. I was a happy participant in the new and exciting counterculture, but at the same time was still sitting Arts courses with teachers asking Bloom’s question, overtly or by implication.

The next section of the book traces a quick history of philosophy from about 1700 to 1900, dealing with the trajectory from UK empiricists like Locke and Hume to French and German humanists like Rousseau, Kant, and Nietzsche. Dry though this might seem I enjoyed thinking of reason replacing religion, and eventually a logic-based humanism confronting the catastrophes of the 20^th century. Descriptions of the thinking of Nietzsche in particular started me reading his work.

Next, we are served up an interesting story about traditional academic disciplines as they evolved during that 20^th century up to near its end when Bloom was writing. Psychology trying to deal with the unconscious parted company with Biology which “cannot even account for consciousness within (it’s) science”. The humanities suffered from the growth of natural science and deteriorated says Bloom even though

All that is human, all that is of concern to us, lies outside of natural science. That should be a problem for natural science, but it is not. It is certainly a problem for us.

The problem had to do with a big change in liberal arts education which I think has pretty much completed today. Natural science and professional training in university just see to their own business. High schools focused on freedom, relativism and equality send students to those universities unable to do junior high math, write a paragraph, and in some cases even read.

My perception of the today’s Arts and Humanities is indirect, but a few years ago some other doctors doing geriatrics and I gave a course, Introduction to Frailty, to first year medical students. We of course were not expected to assess those students but rather to receive their assessment of our presentations. Most of the comments told us that we should have been focusing on racism and gender. We had thought we were teaching about elderly people. I imagine students who set aside specific information presented to them and respond with virtue signalling wouldn’t be posing questions like “What is a human being?” which Allan Bloom believed is the purpose of a liberal education.

Criticism of Bloom’s book focuses on “elitism”. He’s considered to be looking down his nose at ordinary people. In this book he didn’t prescribe a solution to the loss of serious thought about human values he was seeing. He died in 1992 five years after it was published. I think some of the things he said were a bit prophetic, but I suspect they were so mostly where he lived and worked: the arts and humanities at universities.

The message I take after reading his concerns in the late 1980s is that universities are very much different than they used to be. I wonder whether except for cutting-edge pure science or professional training university these days could end up for a lot of people a disappointing waste of time. And I ask myself where does serious self-critical creativity live now? I imagine I see it among writers, artists and ordinary people who are learning introspection and creativity from life experience. A four-year BA in History or English Literature just might be profitably (including literally) replaced for smart honest people by striking out on their own.

You’d have to be a bit of an arts academic frump to get excited about the contents here, but there’s a feistiness and lovely humanistic enthusiasm running through Bloom’s criticism of the tyranny of the ordinary in higher education. Anyway it helped me to understand that finding one’s way to serious lively living isn’t what’s going on in university these days.

8.0/8.6