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.
This is in large part why an Article V convention is our last hope. Scotus is unhinged. It isn't satisfied with mere corruption of our Constitution. Through its meddling with the civil society, (abortion, fag marriage, and much more) it is actually going after our Declaration of Independence! Try as they might, a majority of lawyers in black robes cannot repeal the Laws of Nature and Nature's God. Much of the turmoil in 21st century America is attributable to this meddling with fundamental law above the Constitution and beyond the reach of man.
Closed to truth and decency, but open to trash, lies and evil. And if continued, the end of America.
These were not federal statutes, but local.
Where the federal is concerned we need only fight for the 10th Amendment tooth and nail.
The reason you put off reading “Closing of the American Mind” for so long, that it is insufferably dull; nearly impossible, to read. It is the most important sleep-inducing treatise I have ever read. It sat on my bedside table and it took me months to wade through it.
Oh there is still recourse, just not LEGAL recourse.
Ultimately, our last recourse is ourselves, our speech, our fists, or, if needs be, more aggressive measures. By removing the legal recourse, this area of society will now be encompassed under the “law of the jungle”.
The 10th amendment has been toothless for at least a century now, that battle was already lost.
No, it is still there to win so long as the language remains unamended.
Frankly, I’d be okay with some group of women kicking the **** out of some dude in drag because he came into the women’s rest room.
I’d not personally hit a woman in a guy’s bathroom though, under the opposing circumstances, though I may offer her a handful of paper towels to clean up beforehand (I mean, come on fellas, it’s a foot wide and more than a foot long ... not some shot glass at 10 paces).
Am I missing something?
I thought the idea behind moral relativism is that whatever the ‘group’ thinks is moral, is moral.
Am I getting that right?
Absolutely.
Revolution is never legal. It is typically just.
Before that, we have peaceful means available through Article V.
Long gone, along with just about everything else from my freshman year. It was 30 years ago. :)
My college experience was similar. It was an adult studies program, and the people attending had been around long enough to know a thing or two. The college profs they recruited were used to intimidating and brainwashing a bunch of kids right out of high school and had no experience teaching actual adults with life experience and firm convictions. We made them squirm and flustered and eventually so frustrated that most of them never came back for subsequent semesters. The only exception was the English teacher who was a crusty little Vietnam-vet Airborne troop who described himself as “slightly to the right of Attila the Hun.” He hated his colleagues as much as we did and was tickled when we go their goat.
“Thus, the great Leftist opening is actually a great closing. Values are relative. Create whatever lifestyle you wish. “
Unless that lifestyle:
- Can be perceived as denying blacks rights
- Contributes to their perception of global warming
- Doesn’t approve of the gay lifestyle
- Thinks Israel should exist
- Believes in a smaller, less powerful central government
According to today’s Left, you shouldn’t be allowed to create a lifestyle based around these values (among others).
Fantastic! Wish I could have been there to join you guys and watch (and be a part of) the fun. :D
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