Posted on 05/02/2016 12:35:38 PM PDT by Jacquerie
I don’t know how I managed for so long to put off reading Allan Bloom’s 1986 The Closing of the American Mind..
I’m only through the Preface and Introduction, and the condition of American higher education he described thirty years ago is chilling. I might not read any further. The young people of that era are now the heads of various university departments and occupy high positions in government including the presidency. Today, the students of Bloom’s book coddle all the dangerous nonsense we’ve recently seen in the form of moral relativism, Black Lives Matter, White Privilege, LGBT baloney, and the active importation and protection of Mexicans and Muzzies at the expense of Americans.
Bloom regarded his work as a report from the front, which implies he might be just a disinterested embedded reporter. Uh, no way; he is a protagonist in the fight to save Western Civilization.
Rather than attempt to present his observations in a smoothed essay, I’ll list some of the highlights I’ve collected in the form of bullet points below. Like me, you’ll catch the drift of how Obama’s team and the media rationalize the destruction of our republic.
• Bloom wrote that almost all students say they believe the truth is relative. No matter their backgrounds, they are unified in their relativism and allegiance to equality. These have replaced the traditional inalienable natural rights that used to be the American grounds for a free society. This isn’t the equality of our Framers before God and the Law.
• We, the True Believers, are dangerous. History proves the world was mad. Men were so mad they thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecution, slavery, etc. Don’t bother to correct mistakes. Rather, don’t think about being right at all.
• Relativism is important because it is necessary to openness, which is the only virtue inculcated by the last fifty years of primary education. While the term suggests a student body in search of the truth, it is precisely the opposite.
• Before: Emphasis on natural rights, in which class, race, religion, national origin, became dim when bathed in the light of natural rights, which gave men common interests and made them truly brothers.
• Modern openness rejects all that. There is no attention to natural rights. There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything.
• Leftists resist the notion that outsiders must give up their culture and individuality. They are angry that one must participate in natural rights or be doomed to an existence on the fringe.
• Openness was to give ethnic groups respect from those not disposed to give it, like the WASP majority. Modern social science is designed to do away with the WASP majority.
• Our Founders’ principles are impedimenta.
• Recall our Founders didn’t much care for factions, yet they didn’t even try to suppress them. Instead, they came up with an elaborate governing structure in which factions tended to cancel each other out, and make way for the common good.
• The Constitution was to protect fundamental rights from majoritarianism.
• Thus, the great Leftist opening is actually a great closing. Values are relative. Create whatever lifestyle you wish. Leftists might consult a guru from time to time, yet they’ll avoid the historical sense of a Machiavelli who wrested a few hours from each busy day “to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.”
• Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. Openness as practiced is meaningless. Cultural relativism destroys the good.
• Cultural relativism destroys the West’s intellectual claims and renders it just another culture.
• Unfortunately, the West is defined by its need for the justification of its ways or values, by its need for discovery of nature, by its need for philosophy and science. This is its cultural imperative. Deprived of that, the West will collapse.
• The United States is one of the highest and most extreme achievements of the rational quest for the good life according to nature. What makes its political structure possible is the use of the rational principles of natural right to found a people, and thus uniting the good with one’s own.
• IOW, the government established by the Constitution promised untrammeled freedom to reason – the essential reason that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which, and for the sake of which, much deviance is also tolerated. An openness that denies the special claim of reason bursts the mainspring keeping the mechanism of this regime in motion. And this regime, contrary to all claims to the contrary, was founded to overcome ethnocentrism, which is in no sense a discovery of social science.
Don’t reach for the razor blade. Evidence of the superiority of Natural Law is all around. The rise of Trump alone reflects an electorate disgusted with our national trajectory, a trajectory created by over a hundred years of Leftism!
If America was so drugged on the moral relativism of Bloom’s book, over half of the states wouldn’t have challenged Obamacare and Obama’s open borders. Progressive California wouldn’t have passed both a statute and constitutional amendment in support of traditional marriage. Sure, college kids who do not yet have a positive stake in real life, and very well paid senior members of government and almost all of media can afford to goosestep toward the Utopian cliff, yet how often have you read of parents in support of Common Core? I’m not aware of any parents standing up at a local school board meeting to demand that educators make their children stupid.
I do not wish to imply that our situation isn’t critical, yet Natural Law is real. The history of repressive regimes show that while our nature can be suppressed, it cannot be destroyed. Our task is to channel national disgust away from the bad and toward the good.
Voting every two years is insufficient effort. Contact and press your state legislators to apply for an Article V convention; volunteer to the Convention of States.
The progressive liberal left and the idea of relativism represent the useful idiots of our day.
They set the stage for a tyrant to come along and rule them all with an iron fist.
That’s what history teaches us...and if it continues, history will repeat.
If you haven’t read this book already, READ THIS BOOK NOW!
Well, asap. ;^)
Read the book over 20 years ago. Bookmarked for later reference. Thanks for the post.
Bkmk
When I was in college, my liberal professor (excuse the redundancy) announced that we could do a report on ANY contemporary social studies book we wanted. I told him I wanted to report on this one and he almost had a stroke. At first he was about to refuse, but after I pressed the issue somewhat, he grudgingly gave in.
Secular humanism states that there are no divine absolutes so there are no absolute standards of right and wrong, which leads to subjectivism, which leads to ethical relativism, situation ethics, cultural relativism, new morality, experimental lifestyles, moral equivalency, and permissive morality.
Postmodernism states that there is no universal objective truth. No one knows what is right or best for another adult.There is only the truth of the particular group one belongs to, which leads to cultural and social relativism.
Christian ethics in based on moral absolutes based on God's character or moral decree, which is the final standard.
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Okay. If you insist. How often did you have to shower? Once per chapter?
bfl
Do you happen to still have your report?
This has happened to me a lot. I often challenged my fascist in class. Also dropped me down a full grade even though I was always an A student. But I didn't care in my Master's program. The younger kids watched me and I believe I taught them not to drink the Kool Aid AND the it was Kool Aid. lol.
Atlas is shrugging as we speak! Who is John Galt?
Just recently, arguably because of a very poorly thought out thread this guy started over on Hannity, I realized something about the recent to-do in Charlotte and North Carolina, as well as elsewhere.
No matter what those pushing for self definition of “gender” may claim, or may even believe,in their struggle for some new “equality” what they are really, really doing is removing and possible chance for recourse from — and we must be blunt here for not many men are worried about being ogled or what have you my gals in men’s restrooms — women who do not want men in their bathrooms.
By this I mean that prior to the current push for getting guys who think they’re gals into women’s restrooms, as happened in Charlotte, if a woman was in a restroom (set aside for members of her sex) discovered a man was present she could even demand that he be removed.
She had recourse to do something about him being there.
This is because a woman’s restroom was set aside for people whose sex was female (just as a men’s restroom is for those whose sex is “male”) and by offering it as an accommodation for that purpose the provider actually undertook the obligation to ensure that what was promised was what was given.
Under regulations or policies like that adopted by Charlotte though the promise was upended, and anyone who identifies themselves accordingly may go on in. The legitimization of self-identified “gender” is incompatible with persons having a restroom set aside for those of their own sex and being able to demand the removal of intruders not of the sex, which is to say, pople of the opposite sex.
Now the poorly thought out thread I mentioned compared the State law to making guns illegal.
I pointed out how his OP did not hold up; also, I came up with a more accurate point of comparison.
Statutes like the one adopted by Charlotte, which honor “gender”, are like laws that require retreat rather than permit self defense.
If, for example, a woman does not want men in her bathroom the only way she may expect that is if she retreats, if she ceases to use public restrooms where a confused guy may wander in at any time (at least in theory).
She has no recourse to defend that space for those of her sex.
But statutes like those adopted by the State of North Carolina are like stand your ground laws: they restore or ensure the recourse of people to demand those not of the sex for which the bathroom is set aside be removed.
Such laws were not even necessary till the wacky left started insisting that self-identification is all that matter sand likewise pushing that view on everyone else.
Closing of the American Mind, a very sad book...
As the article says, the students of that time are now in charge and they think truth is relative. Imagine what they think of words. And agreements and contracts.
So I don’t think Article V is any solution.
The great evil irony is ‘they’ mock and say no to God’s absolute morality while creating their own absolute morality—not to be disagreed or argued with. Marx said the best manipulation is accusing another or what you are doing. The libs do this in spades. (Can we still say in spades btw?) :D
Kirsten Powers’ “The Silencing” also addresses this quite well.
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I agree with your comments, here. If the Leftist youth actually had any understanding of historic dynamics, they would go down on their knees tonight and pray for a Trump victory; lest their future parallel that of the last couple hundred Jacobins in Paris, whom the emergent Napoleon turned into hamburger with grape shot in 1795. There are as Carlyle remarked almost two centuries ago, still marks in an historic church from the shot that Napoleon ordered discharged into the mob.
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