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]]]]]]]]]]]]] A CULTURAL CRITIC ANSWERS HIS OWN [[[[[[[[[[[[
By Allan Bloom (4/1/1989)
[Mr. Bloom is professor in the Committee on Social Thought at
the University of Chicago. This essay was adapted from an
address delivered at Harvard.]
From The Wall Street Journal, 30 March 1989, p. A12:1
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
I have gotten a great kick out of becoming the academic
equivalent of a rock star. This is partly because the eternal
American child in me found it agreeable to experience peculiarly
American success from the inside -- to find out if I had been
missing anything. But mostly it was because I was afforded a
closeup look at the closing of the American mind. I have had to
learn, however, to be careful to avoid injury as it slams shut on
me.
I tried in my book to point to the great sources of those
serious ideas that have become dogmas in America today. I urged
that we turn to serious study of them in order to purge ourselves
of our dogmatism. For this I have been violently attacked as a
nostalgic, an ideologue, a doctrinaire, etc., etc. The meaning is
really, ``Don't touch our belief structure; it hurts.''
This dogmatism is neatly expressed in a report recently put
out by the American Council of Learned Societies. Modestly
entitles ``Speaking for the Humanities,'' it announces a
``consensus'' at the cutting edge of scholarship that a single
method of studying classic texts is true: They are to be studied
as the unconscious expression of the class, race and gender
interests or prejudices of their authors. This method will
overturn the hegemony of white, Western, male writers and ideas.
Scholars who do not accept this way of looking at things are
considered not serious.
The report notes that the success of my book is ``disturbing''
and can be accounted for by American anti-intellectualism. In
fact their method is the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques
Derrida, two French writers who passed out of fashion in Paris
and whose importation to these shores is like a late arriving
miniskirt. All the girls, the report tells us, are wearing it.
Their work is in turn based on the really serious thought of
Nietzsche and Heidegger, whose writings are what really ought to
be studied to find out whether their arguments are true. Instead
we are invited by this bureaucratic order to adopt their
conclusions unreflectively.
We ought to know, on the basis of historical observation, that
what epochs consider their greatest virtue is most often really
their greatest temptation, vice or danger -- Roman manliness,
Spanish piety, British class, German authenticity. We have to
learn to put the scalpel to our virtues.
Plato suggests that if you're born in a democracy you are
likely to be a relativist. Relativism may perhaps be an American
virtue, but since we are by birthright inclined to it, we
especially better think it over for the sake of our freedom and
self-awareness.
I wrote about relativism in ``The Closing of the American
Mind'' speaking of it under its currently reputable name,
openness. I have since learned with what moral fervor it is
protected and its opposite, ethnocentrism, attacked. This fervor
does not propose an investigation but a crusade. The very idea
that we ought to look for standards by which to judge ourselves
in naughty, and there has been a more or less successful attempt
to remove my views from respectable discourse. You simply have
to believe in the current understanding of openness if you are to
believe in democracy and be a decent person.
If you do not toe this line, you will be called an elitist, a
charge meant to make you suspect as an enemy of our democratic
nation. This charge of elitism reflects the moral temper of our
time, as the charge of impiety would have done in an earlier age.
You couldn't get much of a response in a university today saying
that Mr. So-and-So is an atheist, but you can get a lot of people
worked up by saying that Mr. Bloom is an elitist. And this tells
us a lot about where things are at, and explains how tempting a
career is offered to egalitarian Tartufferie.
What we are witnessing in our elite universities is the
introduction of a new ``non-elitist,'' ``non-exclusionary''
system of education in the humanities and parts of the social
sciences. This is an extremely radical project that is made to
appear mainstream by marching under the colors of all the
movements toward a more equal society that almost all Americans
endorse. Henry Louis Gates, W.E.B. DuBois professor of
literature at Cornell, has described this as his generation's
progress from taking over buildings in the '60s to taking over
curricula in the '80s -- from rifles to canons at Cornell. We
face a radicalism that is not recognized for what it is and that
can marshal powerful and sometimes angry passions alongside its
own fanatic ones.
This movement culminates in a program for the reform of the
human understanding. This results in a struggle between two ways
of approaching our intellectual heritage. To illustrate these
approaches I have selected two quotations. The first is the
voice of black educator W.E.B. DuBois at the turn of the century:
``I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color
line I walk arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men
and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves
of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the
tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what
soul I will, they come all graciously with no scorn or
condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil.''
I confess that this view is most congenial to me. DuBois
found our common transcultural humanity not in a canon, but in
certain works from which he learned about himself and gained
strength for his lonely journey, beyond the veil. He found
community rather than war. He used books to think about his
situation, moving beyond the corrosive of prejudice to the
independent and sublime dignity of the fully developed soul. He
recapitulates the ever-renewed experience of books by intelligent
poor and oppressed people seeking for a way out.
The second quotation is attributed to a leader of the black
student group at Stanford. It dates from a year ago, during the
Stanford curriculum debate: ``The implicit message of the
[Western civilization] curriculum is `nigger go home.' '' DuBois
from this perspective was suffering from false-consciousness, a
deceptive faith in theoretical liberation offered by the
inventors of practical slavery.
The way out offered by the Stanford reforms is a sort of world
tour with a relativist compass and without an ``ethnocentic''
life jacket. The school motto appears ``Join Stanford and See
the World.'' Students are called upon to open themselves up to
new cultures. They are not to judge those cultures using the
``Western imperialist'' criteria. Indeed, they are not to judge
one culture better than any other culture at all.
From this perspective contemporary writers face considerable
theoretical embarrassment. When threatened, they run like a herd
of buffalo back to the discredited universalistic principle of
freedom of speech, no longer mindful of the sacred claims of
religions and cultures that they have been preaching to us. To
defend that right, though, they would have to read the writers
who grounded it, Locke and Milton. But we know, don't we, what
the motives of these philosophers are?
Practically, universities are ceding the despised historicized
humanities to the political activists and extremists, leaving
their non-historicized disciplines, which is where the meat and
big bucks are, undisturbed. It is a windfall for the
administrators to be able to turn all the affirmative action
complaints over to the humanities, which will act as a lightening
rod while their ship continues its stately progress over
undisturbed waters. Stanford shows its concerned, humane,
radical face to its inner community, and its serious technical
face to the outside community, particularly to its donors. The
humanities radicals will settle for this on the calculation that
if they can control the minds of the young, they ultimately will
gain political control over the power of science.
If we allow ourselves to be seduced by this radical
enterprise, we will turn our backs on the profound sources of our
self-awareness. Our loss will be irreparable. This is the view
that put me at war with the powers of our day. Anyone who
defends what those powers call the West is automatically eligible
for admission to the elitist, sexist and racist club.
* * *
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