Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind

New York Times ^ | September 4, 2005 | JIM SLEEPER

[Nicholas Conradin]

CONSERVATIVES in 1987 may still have been basking in Ronald Reagan's ''morning in America,'' but nothing prepared their movement, or the academic and publishing worlds, for the wildfire success of Allan Bloom's ''Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.'' Amid a furor recalling that over William F. Buckley Jr.'s ''God and Man at Yale'' in 1951, Bloom indicted liberal academics for betraying liberal education. His attack sold more than a million copies.
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But everyone seems to have missed the elephant in the room: Bloom's ostensibly conservative meditation in fact anticipated and repudiated almost every political, religious and economic premise of Kimball's and Horowitz's movement. Conservatives who reread Bloom today are in for a big, perhaps instructive, surprise.

[Nicholas Conradin]

Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of ''The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York'' and ''Liberal Racism.''

[NavySEAL F-16]

Horowitz himself protested recently to The Chronicle of Higher Education. ''I want them to be academic, scholarly.'' The magazine reported, however, that his small board of directors included John O'Neill of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. That can't be kind of the truth Allan Bloom had in mind.

This is the last sentence in the article, which told me everything I needed to know.

[johnny7]

Every once in a while I re-read Bloom's book... and I do that only with the best ones.

[Fzob]

Two comments

1 Mr Sleeper seems confused as to what the conservative mind is thinking.

2. Bloom's main point in (IMHO) was simply that universities and our education systems in general have moved to teaching and researching within a teleological rather than deontological framework; with an end that everything is relative and nothing has meaning.

[WOSG]

"Conservatives who reread Bloom will also discover that the 60's left reminded him of the right-wing hordes his mentor Leo Strauss had encountered in Europe in the 30's: ''The fact that in Germany the politics were of the right and in the United States of the left should not mislead us. In both places the universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements'' whose participants, full of animal spirits and spiritual animus, undertook ''the dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry.'' Yet Kimball and Horowitz themselves are trying to rouse a mass movement of alumni, the public and legislatures to ''take back'' the university.

''Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children'' coming back from college and jettisoning ''every moral, religious, social and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe,'' Kimball cries. But Bloom wanted reason to overturn familial and religious commitments, if necessary, to forge deeper attachments to truth and civic-republican virtue. Try to imagine Bloom's seconding Kimball's praise for ''the rise of conservative talk radio, the popularity of Fox News . . . and the spread of interest in the Internet with its many right-of-center populist Web logs'' as ''heartening signs'' that conservatives are becoming ''a widespread counter to the counterculture'' of universities.

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His review misunderstand SO FUNDAMENTALLY the issue at stake: The so-called Liberals have turned into Marxist radicals who are destroying the University.

The debates about 'what is man' or the place of religion - these debates CANT EVEN TAKE PLACE if the Marxist ideologues and the radicalism of the 60s - now embedded as 'political correctness' - rules on campus. Bloom was RIGHT to see echos of Nazism in the 60s radicalism, because it is motivated by the same Gramscian belief in using politics and culture as twin angles of attack in gaining power. The University becomes a tool for gaining and projecting power, and spreading ideological conformity.

That was Bloom's point. Bloom was on Universities like Charles Murray on welfare; he didnt have a prescription, he had a diagnosis. The diagnosis was about how the radicalism of the 1960s had turned universities into places of ideological conformity and indoctrination.

The diagnosis of the destruction of civil debate and the 'closing of the American mind' is still valid. We see it in the cases like Ward Churchill or others like him, extreme leftists who spread their poison and who have competitors on campus to call the bluff of their nonsense. Conservative speech is actively suppressed; speech codes, the methods used by nazis and communists to enforce ideologies, routinely are used to keep non-radical beliefs caged and repressed.

Whether you take Horowitz's or Kimball's or Bloom's solution is up to you, but all agree on the problem.

[ModelBreaker]

In other words, what the left has done to the Universities is indefensible. But the conservatives are bad guys and they have an agenda. So just leave things the way they are at the Universities.

[msnimje]

Allan Bloom's ''Closing of the American Mind

I just dusted this book off yesterday to start reading it again. I read it while in college and have become much more conservative since then so I cannot wait to see how it see the book now.

[Pharmboy]

Similarly, Horowitz's Academic Bill of Rights would force professors to teach scholarly work opposed to their own. Most already do that, but it's hard to imagine that Horowitz, or his conservative allies, want Milton Friedmanite free-marketeers to be required to tell their packed economics classes about Daniel Bell's claim, anticipating Bloom, that our economy had led to ''corporate oligopoly, and, in the pursuit of private wants, a hedonism that is destructive of social needs.''

Can you imagine that this idiot teaches at Yale? He doesn't know that corporate America is demonized in essentially every history, sociology and psychology class NOW? And, as another poster above has noted, Sleeper mischaracterizes the academic goals of the right.

The left is consistent in one thing: their lying.

[Vision Thing]

Bloom was on Universities like Charles Murray on welfare; he didnt have a prescription, he had a diagnosis. The diagnosis was about how the radicalism of the 1960s had turned universities into places of ideological conformity and indoctrination.

You're right. Bloom offered a diagnosis of the university's problems. However, he went beyond just offering a diagnosis. He also gave the following prescription: With an open mind, today's students should read the Great Books, such as Plato's Republic, Shakespeare's plays, etc. Only then can students compare what they see around them against humanity's highest standards.

[Dumb_Ox]

The author is right that Bloom is elitist(not a bad thing, in my view) and contemporary conservative politics is populist. But I think he's stretching a bit to claim that conservative use of Bloom is hypocritical or completely contradictory. Bloom's book was a watershed, but conservatives are no more bound to embrace every jot and tittle than they are bound to endorse every comment of, say, Jefferson or Hamilton.

Still, I do have my doubts about Bloom and, less so, the Straussian school of thought which he largely follows. I suspect that, for instance, Bloom laments the spread of Nietzscheanism not because he dislikes Nietzsche, but because he knows Nietzscheanism is not to be popularized.

[SirJohnBarleycorn]

What a dishonest piece of tripe Mr. Sleeper has written. One hardly knows where to start.

The suggestion that Bloom would equate the fight by conservatives to have their views even available in the academic marketplace of ideas to the "mass movement" by the nazis in 1930s Germany which culminated in their dominance in the German universities is obviously false to anyone who reads Bloom.

The problem, of course, as Bloom recognized, is that the leftist intellectual barbarians in fact have gained complete dominance in the American university and have moved to suppress all viewpoints but their own. As good marxists or neo-marxists, the left believes that academic freedom is merely a fraud perpetuated to keep the oppressed masses in a state of false consciousness, and so naturally when the left moves into power, it has no bad conscience about ruthlessly weeding out unacceptable voices from tenured positions and imposing speech codes, etc. to further their political goals. The fight by American conservatives is for true intellectual diversity, the kind of diversity that in the end is the most important.

And while I think it is clear from Bloom that he quite sympathizes with Nietzsche's diagnosis of society's crisis (something American conservatism generally does NOT agree with), Bloom nevertheless utterly repudiates Nietzsche's remedy.

[dervish]

What's Sleeper's point? The fact is there is active repression of ideas and speech on campus today. That's what Bloom saw coming and opposed. Whether Bloom would have endorsed specific views is not the point. Nor is it Horowitz's point today. Conservatives are happy to compete in the marketplace of ideas on university campuses. That they are not permitted to do so bespeaks the power of their ideas.

Conservative think tanks in the US are contributing the best ideas and are shaping the political landscape. The left in its deconstructive mode has no new ideas.

It is scary to think of the corruption on campuses today of young people who are carefully exposed only to anti-US, anti-Corporation, anti-religion, basically anti everything that shaped the collective character of this country.

Academic Freedom is nothing but free today.

[Archon of the East]

''The fact that in Germany the politics were of the right and in the United States of the left should not mislead us

I know NAZI's have been labeled "right wing" but weren't they in realty very much left? I could never quite figure out how conservatives have be labeled National Socialist's.

[Nicholas Conradin]

I know NAZI's have been labeled "right wing" but weren't they in realty very much left? I could never quite figure out how conservatives have be labeled National Socialist's.

Right and left in a European context do not correspond to the usage of the terms in modern America.

The Nazis actually felt they were a centrist party between the Right (Reaktion) who wanted to restore the monarchy, and the Left of the Communists (Rotfront). [These terms are used in the Horst Wessel Lied, the Nazi theme song.]

IMHO, the proper term to the designate modern free-market policy would be "classical liberal" - which further confuses things!

[Blind Eye Jones]

But the problem is how to capture the original thinkers thoughts -- how they thought about themselves -- without deforming those thoughts through the use of modern terminology, easy jargon, a Marxist lens, etc.? Students need an alternative view to the past, that goes beyond today's usual cultural dogma that the past is inferior, full of nasty racists & patriarchs, etc. In this way Bloom is also known for his very literal interpretation of the Republic.

[Blind Eye Jones]

"he knows Nietzscheanism is not to be popularized."

It already has been by both the left and the right. Ayn Rand is probably the biggest exponent of the right.