I remember Allan Bloom

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.

“Holmes, who by his influential station in society as an abolitionist, Civil War hero, well-respected author, legal scholar, intellectual, Harvard professor and Supreme Court justice, was the key figure between 1870-1930 who helped transform American culture away from reliance on the founders who believed in transcendent principles to the vague world of randomness, meaninglessness and evolving standards of Darwinian evolution as the basis of all American laws.”

Good post. Like the epilogue.
Thanks

In "The Closing of the American Mind," Bloom taught us many important things; there are too many to address here, but most significantly he taught us that Hobbes, Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Lenin, Hitler, Freud, Holmes were all brilliant philosophers, but historically their ideas only condemn mankind into the abyss. They did not and could never redeem humanity.
Hearkening back to Aristotle's first principles outlined in his "Metaphysics," Bloom gave a singular statement on the objective of good education: "The golden thread of all education is in the first questions: How should I live? What's the good life? What can I hope for? What must I do? What would be the terrible consequences if we knew the truth?"

In our present Age of Obama, that last question is both prophetic and painful, which leads me to wonder if professor Bloom were alive today to witness our present collapse into intellectual depravity, economic anarchy and societal nihilism, what would he say? Perhaps Bloom would ask this question: America, why did you allow communists, socialists and progressives to close your mind to the precious and transcendent gifts of Western civilization?

Blooms book "The Closing of the American Mind," is a masterpiece. In the coming post apocalyptic world it should becomes required reading

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