Free Republic

Our Declaration of Independence was not only illegal, it was an act of treason. Like today, most men in 1776 worldwide equated that which is legal with justice. Who could argue against the idea that justice is joined with statutory law? Equate the legal with the just, and the law can be whatever presidents for life, oligarchs, or a majority say it is. Mankind can be fragmented into a welter of nations, each with its own morality. Might makes right. Justice is rendered relative among the nations of the world. Since there is no single standard of justice, all standards...

I read this book shortly after it was published. I thought it must be wrong. I went to college (undergrad and grad...top of school at grad). I didn't like my professors for the most part but they seemed to be OK. In fact some were geniuses or thereabouts. But then I found this book.

Our Declaration of Independence was not only illegal, it was an act of treason. Like today, most men in 1787 worldwide equated that which is legal with justice. Who could argue against the idea that justice is joined with statutory law? Equate the legal with the just, and the law can be whatever presidents for life, oligarchs, or a majority say it is. Mankind can be fragmented into a welter of nations, each with its own morality. Might makes right. Justice is rendered relative among the nations of the world. Since there is no single standard of justice, all standards...

"The Closing of the American Mind"If I had reread The Closing of the American Mind 10 years ago, when my own children were themselves under 10, I confess I would have thought Bloom’s portrait of educational decline was overwrought. And then they grew up and went off to college. ..............[Allan] Bloom wrote a moment before the population of modernity’s Holy Trinity - Marx, Freud, and Darwin - decreased by two-thirds. Marx lost his allure, at least nominally, after the collapse of the murderous regimes that had been built from his ideas. Freud was demoted from scientist to cultural observer, and...

For Bloom, the moral vacuum created by liberalism inside the souls of Americans was filled by demagogic radicals in the ’60s similar to the Nazi Brownshirts who in the ’20s and ’30s filled the breach created in German society by the Weimar Republic. Bloom further argued that liberal values of philosophy and reason understood as freedom of thought, had been hijacked by relativism, a pseudo-philosophy or ideology of thought, which Bloom identified as the primary aspect of modern liberal philosophy responsible for sabotaging the Socratic-Platonic worldview, logic and canonical teachings.

Liberals always think there's something broken in politics. Conservatives always think there's something wrong with the culture. Why that gives Sarah Palin and the Republicans the edge in November. Culture war, culture war! In our nation of revivals -- theatrical, cinematic and political -- this one sounds exciting, and promises a riveting new story line in the riveting presidential campaign. But the idea of a resurrected culture war is all sound bites and flurry, and not much else. A war requires two sides to fight it. Yet the Republicans are clamoring about the culture while the Democrats insist on sticking...

We are all rockers now. National Review publishes its own chart of the Fifty Greatest Conservative Rock Songs, notwithstanding that most of the honorees are horrified to find themselves on such a hit parade. The National Review countdown of the All-Time Hot 100 Conservative Gangsta Rap Tracks can’t be far away. Even right-wingers want to get with the beat and no-one wants to look like the wallflower who can’t get a chick to dance with him. To argue against rock and roll is now as quaintly irrelevant as arguing for the divine right of kings. It was twen- ty years...

It has now been twenty years since the late Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, his bestselling broadside against the ideas and conceptions that animate the contemporary university. The general theme of Bloom’s book is encapsulated in the subtitle: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. . . .The Closing of the American Mind has been interpreted as one of those influential salvos in the cultural wars of recent decades between reformers and traditionalists on the campus and between conservatives and liberals in the society at large. . . . Bloom...

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. ---- snip ---- But everyone seems to have missed the elephant in the room: Bloom's ostensibly conservative...

The power of music in the soul--described to Jessica marvelously by Lorenzo in the Merchant of Venice--has been recovered after a long period of desuetude. And it is rock music alone that has affected this restoration. Classical music is dead among the young. This assertion will, I know, be hotly disputed by many who, unwilling to admit tidal changes, can point to the proliferation on campuses of classes in classical music appreciation and practice, as well as performance groups of all kinds. Their presence is undeniable, but they involve not more than 5 to 10 percent of the students....