Allan Bloom, the original cranky ivory tower wingnut. Liberals were so credulous in those days.

My dissertation advisor referred to the book as, "the Closing of Alan bloom's Mind." Also during the same period E D. Hirsch's "Cultural Literacy" was big too. Ugh. Both were attempts to create a formulary of accepted ideas for our children and protect them from liberal ideas.

That's our Kevin. Resiles from something which challenges his preconceptions and curls himself up with some good old view-reinforcing Bush-bashing instead.

I assume you've worn out your Hersh and Suskind collection?

I recall one reviewer stating that, in "The Closing of the American Mind," Bloom had written an unreadable book complaining about how Americans didn't read.

It's a hissy fit of a book.

"Both were attempts to create a formulary of accepted ideas for our children and protect them from liberal ideas."

Hirsch is a liberal who understands that ignorance of the world too often results in illiberality.

I recently read MY PET GOAT.

I did not find it as "captivating" as george bush did. I suppose if I was the head of a criminal cabal that launched an attack on US citizens, I would haven found it much more interesting.

Just goes to show ya - 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB!

This looks insightful:
http://www.amazon.com/Wrecking-Crew-How-Conservatives-Rule/dp/0805079882
on The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
by Thomas Frank.

Also check out this blog/post if I may push the media envelope, especially this chilling post about did the FBI let Bruce Ivins die when they could have saved him - after all, it takes awhile for Tylenol with codeine OD to kill a person, and if we presume 24/7 surveillance why didn't they notice and intervene?
http...anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/2008/08/bombshell-was-fbi-complicit-in-ivins.html

OK maybe he took the stuff at 2 AM and died at 5 AM and they thought he was asleep, whatever (where was his wife?), but the question is worth asking. The blog is simply excellent and must-read if you care about the anthrax case.

I too recently picked up the book ($1:00 for any paperback at a recent church sale) hoping to get a better understanding of the book now than when i read it for the first time.
Now it sits along with my Ayn Rand classics...reminding me that there was a time when I was far less critical of what I read and much more willing to accept any premise.
In the meanwhile, i am on the look out for EF Schumachers "Small is Beautiful" to see if that elicits a similar reaction or if it still holds the appeal that it once did

That joke at the time (maybe half joke) was that Allan Bloom did not exist, he was instead a character created by Saul Bellow.

You have to remember when it was written. We were in the midst of the golden age of American Conservativism and a rebirth of American Exceptionalism. In spite of the idea that academics are liberal - really they are not so much. They feel dependent on maintaining their cahnnon because that is what their jobs are based upon. Many embraced Bloom's idea, if not Bloom, that we were giving away our Western intellectual heritage, that we were short changing the great thinkers in an effort to be "multicultural." There was great fear among American thinkers, who in many ways are some of the most provincial thinkers in the world.

The educators turned around and used that fear to control education. The publication came soon after "A Nation at Risk" and fed right in to this whole idea that we must fear what we are not accomplishing in education, turning education in to an authoritarian enterprise. This is something that actually started with Milton Friedman.

However, as with most books like this, I don't think people actually read it. I think they read the reviews and then pretendeded they read it (how many bindings do you think were actually broken on those bindings of that half a million books).

It's not on line unless you have a subscription, but Martha Nussbaum wrote the most devastating review of Bloom's book by showing that Bloom's knowledge of antiquity, which was the central point of his expertise in writing the book, was almost laughingly shallow. Here is the URL for the Nussbaum review, though again it is only the first few paragraphs unless you have a subscription to the NYRofBP:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=4618

Bloom was a crank. And what is really ironic is that the gay-baiting right wingers who put him on a pedestal did not know that Bloom was a closeted gay. The Republican Party and its right wing cohorts sure do pick 'em...

Good comments, Sam. I also wonder what I would think of "Small is Beautiful" today...

Bloom's problem was that Americans started realizing that white men didn't invent writing and that other people could think too and it made him cranky. Even his much-beloved Columbia Core Curriculum was made with the explicit aim of cutting down on the number of Jewish writers read in academia.

"
Also during the same period E D. Hirsch's "Cultural Literacy" was big too. Ugh. Both were attempts to create a formulary of accepted ideas for our children and protect them from liberal ideas.
"

What justifies placing Hirsch in the same category?
Hirsch's primary point is
(a) that the concept of teaching kids "how to learn" as an abstract task is meaningless if the kids don't have the basic background informations that is required to understand new information they come across and
(b) that there are periods in a child's love where their brains eagerly soak up new facts, and so it makes sense to tailor education to exploit those periods by drowning them in facts.

I picked up no sense, while reading the book that, ala Bloom, he would have the facts that kids are taught limited to the history of Western Civ; heck maybe I'm wrong but from the book he struck me as the kind of guy who would welcome the replacement of, for example, Western Civ or US history courses with World History courses --- more facts about a wider range of subjects is always better.

Now you may disagree with him --- you may believe that the period during which he claims kids soak up facts is not so; you may believe that teenagers can so understand, say, a newspaper article about US-Japan relations even though they know pretty much nothing about WW2 --- but IMHO he made a sufficiently compelling case that I'd require a rather stronger argument against his views than "well I don't think so".

If Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side" doesn't make you seething mad by page 50, check your vital signs. It's not just the disdain of Bush, Cheney, Addington, Tenet, Gonzales, Yoo, et al., for basic legal principles; it's their insistence on interrogation practices that their own experienced interrogators told them - and subsequent experience of interrogation showed them - did not get results. Criminality compounded by criminal stupidity.

He also has an awful translation of Plato's Republic which anyone who's taken or taught ancient philosophy is probably familiar with. Bloom's translation ideal was that you had to always use the same English word to translate the same Greek word whenever it occurred. Yes, well Greek has idiomatic expressions and so does English, but apparently understanding idiom was some sort of decadent liberal failing - real men translated like machines. Thus the translation is awful, and so is COTAM. Remarkable that the same movement should produce him and William F. Buckley.

In partial defense of Bloom, the first chunk of the book is the cultural-crank, you-kids-get-off-my-lawn part. The long, skippable section "From Socrates' Apology to Heidegger's Rectoral Address" is pretty interesting, IIRC.

Caveat: the bastard led me to major in philosophy, thus ruining half my life. So my partial praise is all the more sincere. (I'm not sure that inspiring an interest in Nietzsche was quite what he had in mind.)

Another partial defense: as liberals, we should be able to imagine an old guy who's studied the classics all his life, and is confronted every semester with rich kids who parrot the trendy liberal p.o.v. (there *was* such a thing in the 60s and 70s) w/out any sense of its intellectual origins, much less of its debatable premises.

You'd become a sourpuss, too.

He also has an awful translation of Plato's Republic

Oh, pooh. It's damn useful for students who don't know Greek. *You* try writing a paper about "beauty" in the Republic and then finding out that you've been working off a translation that uses that word for two or three different Greek words.

Different styles of translation are useful for different purposes. I don't know why adults find this startling.

(But yes, The Dark Side is really good, even for those who've read all her N'Yawker articles.)

Maynard Hadley,

Thanks for your E.D Hirsch comment. I was about to post along the same lines, but you put it far more eloquently than I could. As I'm sure you know, Hirsch put his wheel to the grindstone and followed up his book by starting the Core Knowledge Foundation to see his work brought into classrooms by creating K-8 lesson plans.
http://coreknowledge.org/CK/index.htm

His lesson plans are first rate, especially when taught by Direct Instruction.
http://www.baltimorecp.org/history.html

That was the time when the Ivy Leagues decided to put more weight on verbal scores than on quantitative skills as too many Chinese and Indians were getting into these august institutions purely on the basis of their merit. Of course this dis not stop the Asians.

I graduated from high school in 1987 and some well-meaning family friend gave me the Bloom book. I thought his arguments were really stupid.

It looks like George Clooney plans to do a film on the story of Bin Laden's driver.

Did Salim Hamdan say that he was tortured too - because I think Glenn Greenwald mention it.

Yes, it was taken seriously back then.

Lampwick... yes, as a classics major myself, I can say the Plato translation was stupid. Besides that, Bloom cheated with all the adverbial particles of Attic Greek.

Though a thoroughly scaly book that substitutes sneering and condescension for reasoned argument--dogmatism and, yes, closemindedness can rarely have found such a perfect expression--The Closing of the American Mind is not without its unintentionally comic moments. At one point Bloom has worked himself into such a lather, and become so lost in a contorted simile, that he says Hannah Arendt didn't know German.

I only got a few pages into Bloom's book - to the point where he sneers at the students who admit to enjoying Catcher in the Rye - and then I realized that Closing of the American Mind was a how-to manual and I threw it away.

Hm, tempting. I already subscribe to NYRB, so the electronic edition, with full access to the archives, is $20/year. Maybe that's worth it.

Now I'll no longer be able to say that I've never learned anything because of that silly Bloom guy.

More generally on books-- thank God for Amazon.com and their links to used book sellers!

I recently bought a sci fi classic to read for fun at a corporate bookstore because I just didn't feel like waiting around for it or getting a library copy. Without tax the thin book was $14.00!!! It looked like it should have been $6-$9 to my now somewhat-aged perspective. Inflation stinks. Without checking, I am sure I could have gotten it online for less than $10, shipping included.

On the one hand, Anderson, I say you to answer my opinion not most truly. On the other hand, Socratic Gadly, you indeed seem to me to say things having been correct, by Zeus.

If you're looking for an intriguing summer read, i.e., a social history that's a surprising page-turner akin to a good crime novel, I highly recommend Honor Killing by David Stannard. It's a riveting account of the infamous "Massie Affair", which took place in 1930s Honolulu.

Commencing with a brutal beating of a naval officer's wife, Thalia Massie, outside a Waikiki nightclub, the "Massie Affair" comprised an escalating series of questionable personal actions, police and military conduct, false accusations of rape and subsequent tragic consequences, all within a nine-month period. It culminated in a sensational murder trial of Navy Lt. Thomas Massie and his prominent D.C. socialite mother-in-law, Grace Bell Fortescue (heiress to the Bell Telephone Co. fortune), who along with two Navy enlisted men were charged with the lynching of an indigent 21-year-old Hawaiian man, Joseph Kahahawai, Jr.

Little remembered nowadays, the engrossing but sordid "Massie Affair" was the major national news story of its day and actually eclipsed the concurrent Lindbergh baby kidnapping. The murder trial Territory of Hawaii v. Grace Fortescue, et al. was actually renowned criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow's last case (he was retained by the Bell family), and was often broadcast live nationwide over NBC radio.

Sadly, it also resulted in one of the most notorious and shocking travesties of justice in 20th century American jurisprudence -- right up there with O.J. -- and the American media's flagrant and provocative race-baiting probably set Hawaii's statehood back at least one generation.

Swan, et. al.

alibris.com is also a good source for used books, and they support a large network of independent used bookstores. Or used-book stores.

I always had a soft spot for Hirsch, myself, though he volunteered for a Sisyphean task.

As a classicist, one of the questions that I always ask, and can never at this remove of time answer, when reading a text is, 'What am I not getting here, because of something -- some character, some event, some trope -- I don't even know I don't know?"

The problem may be acute in the Classics, but it's chronic in teaching anything in the humanities, even high school history, or English.

I was lent this by a very conservative fundie friend, who asked how I liked it when I gave it back. Not wanting to hurt his feelings I said "for a Jewish atheist homosexual who died from AIDS, not bad."

Though in all fairness, the part where he writes about Mick Jagger is really funny.

"Another partial defense: as liberals, we should be able to imagine an old guy who's studied the classics all his life, and is confronted every semester with rich kids who parrot the trendy liberal p.o.v. (there *was* such a thing in the 60s and 70s) w/out any sense of its intellectual origins, much less of its debatable premises.

You'd become a sourpuss, too.
Posted by: Anderson on August 10, 2008 at 11:07 PM"

Wow, undergrads don't know the entire intellectual history of stuff? Who would have thought?

It just sounds like he was just scared times were changing and he couldn't keep up.

No the problem was deeper.

As Hannah Arendt found, the student radicals of the 60s and 70s could be just as close-minded and doctrinaire as their opponents. The world of the late 60 and early 70s was full of conservative professors who were having students stand up and scream in their classrooms and prevent discourse. A quieter form of the same suppression of free thought still goes on in many academic circles.

The closing of the mind that Bloom talks about is and was very real. Students at my university were being taught 'the answer' to political science, without reference to the entire canon of debate. It was all Mcphersonian possessive individualism, you see.

It's no surprise, given Bloom's charisma, that a bright group of graduate students took refuge in Leo Strauss and his disciples. If you had any questioning bent, the Straussians were always much more stimulating than the orthodox political scientists. And they then went on to populate conservative foreign policy and the Pentagon, etc. Nature abhors a vaccuum.

This was the era when Marxism, semioticism and post-modernism thoroughly corrupted the academe. I think academic discourse in the humanities has never really recovered.

Bloom's comment that the American university was being filled, in the hard sciences and social sciences by narrow-minded 'brilliant idiots' and in the humanities by intense specialism was very apt. It's little wonder undergraduates no longer get much of a 'broad education' (besides the focus on high grades to get into favoured graduate and law schools: see another conservative political scientist, Harvey Mansfield, and his struggle with grading at Harvard).

Beware the classicists' professional jealousy of Bloom (a political scientist). Excepting maybe Robin Lane-Fox, very few classicists have managed to write a bestseller. And they fiercely resist the intellectual invasion of their sphere by political scientists.

Boom, like Marx, was perhaps a better critic than a proposer of remedies.

Valuethinker,

I think you're both over-generalizing and over-stating the "challenge" posed by '60s/'70s radicalism to the academic establishment. Most professors, whether liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between managed to survive the period, the students, and their newfangled rock'n'roll music.

As to Bloom, while he a disciple of Leo Strauss and often described as a philosopher, he wasn't really a political scientist -- his Ph.D. was from the Committee on Social Thought, and he was as much a literary critic as anything.

As for Harvey C. Mansfield and his campaign against grade inflation at Harvard, what does that have to do with anything?

Susan Faludi's discussion of Bloom in _Backlash_ is second only to Nussbaum's evisceration of his book in the NYRB. Strong recommend for the character study of a generally reactionary person, a fourth-rater in academia, who decided his problem was political persecution rather than being fourth-rate (can I point out that while translation is very hard, doing it doesn't generally make you a serious political thinker).

Harvey Mansfield pretty much summarised his level of thinking when stripped of the gravitas lent him by librul Harvard and took his show to Colbert. For those of you not familiar with Straussians who watch it (search engine on comedy central gets it), don't worry- they are really that bad.

C.B. Macpherson would be amazed to be told that the solution to posessive individualism is Straussians. It is a solution to that 'problem' only if you agree that becoming an alcoholic is the solution to a general dislike of the place you work.

I thought the Closing of the American Mind was OK. As someone else noted, the main meat of the book was an intellectual history, in an attempt to put current debates into historical context. Obviously he had his own strong viewpoints, which colors the historical analysis, but did not IMO render it worthless.

I thought his later book on Love and Friendship to be more interesting, although I'd imagine it got even harsher attention by Faludi, since it talked explicitly about the sexual revolution, and indeed was often critical of it. Although I think his attitude was more than of De Tocquevilled towards Democracy--he didn't quite want to turn the clock back, but was also sympathetic towards some of what was lost in moving towards a more democratic society.

As a last note, I know relatively little about Bloom's career, but I can't imagine describing anyone who gets tenure at the U of C as being a 4th rate academic.

Speaking of whiny conservative trash, I happened to see speech on C-span by some Heritage Foundation character called Benjamin Wiker about a book he wrote called "Ten books the screwed up the world." What a dodohead! I was taking it in stride until he accused "the left" of supporting eugenics. Sure - eugenics is a cornerstone of liberal philisophy - right pal!

Of course, he would probably latch onto Goldberg's thesis that Hilter was a liberal.

keith

Think back. You had classrooms occupied, you had picketing of unpopular professors. Voices of dissent to the orthodox consensus were silenced. You couldn't get up on campus and support the Vietnam War, say, or criticise communism as evil. In many ways, this was more a feature of the 1970s than the 60s campus.

The marginalisation of left wingers in the rest of society, to the point where they are now really only dominant in a number of university faculties, had not yet taken place.

It wasn't newfangled rock and roll (although what Bloom says about popular culture is manifestly true ie that rock and roll deadens the mind compared to classical music-- ask any professor who has struggled with the 'tv generation'). It was quite deliberate and destructive internal politicking by aggressive graduate students and faculty.

I am thinking some of the destructive cheapshots Edward Said threw against fellow academicians of the Middle East. A good idea, Orientalism, but used to extreme political ends.

The irony Bloom missed (or doesn't highlight, I suspect he knew it but like many public intellectuals, chose to play to his audience) is that the 1980s free market capitalism was the greatest destroyer of the world he loved: the kids switched to business majors, the liberal academe was even more marginalised. The logic of industrial capitalism is making everything adhere to a 'market logic' and nothing could be more destructive of 'conservative values'. I have a sneaking admiration for the Paul Weyrich bunch (yes, I know, Pat Buchanan is an anti-semitic bastard) and think of people I consider to be true conservatives like Andrew Bacevich (a man of great dignity, especially with the death of his son in a war he opposed) rather than the 'wannabe warriors' like Feith and Wolfowitz and the free market types.

Chicago was of course the perfect place for this freemarket corrosion to be unleashed from the economics department, which genuinely was staging an intellectual revolution against the Keynesian orthodoxy of economics in the 1960s. It was a natural political ally for a form of 'conservatism' that doesn't actually sit easily alongside.

But humanities departments have, then and subsequently, been paralysed by an extreme left wing clique, and the sort of subsequent follow-ons: post-modernism etc, all is relative except of course for racism and sexism which are absolutes, etc.

I take your point about Bloom (and Scott's below) as not a first rate thinker or publisher. However he also wrote a bestseller, and that never does anyone in academia any good with his or her peers. the more obscure and uncommercial, the better. Even someone like Paul Krugman or Greg Mankiw gets stick for writing a bestselling textbook.

He was a great teacher though, at least from the little I encountered him, and what my peers reported first hand. The contradictions of personality revealed in 'Ravelstein' just make him more likable in some ways, less the figure that the conservatives of the time would have had you believe.

I guess in a sense Below himself was an 'angry old man'. The book is a very interesting meditation on friendship and love.

Scott

on my campus, the Marxians (and what I might call the 'leftist instrumentalists' see below) ruled political thought, and the Straussians were the alternative underground. You set up something of a straw man (I didn't say the only alternative to CBM was Strauss).

(it got nasty. The Straussian political science professors and their graduate students were by and large Jewish. Just as there is an anti-semitic tinge to some of the attacks on the neocons, so there was in the campus at the time).

The political science faculty had adopted, largely, the instrumentalist 'social science' view of human beings (imported in part from economics) and the contrary notion that there were such things as truth, beauty and justice, and that we should consider what they were, and whether the Greeks had meant something entirely different, and whether in a sense Machiavelli was right in his entirely instrumental view of human nature, was a bracing breath of fresh air in every way.

Saul Bellow not Below of course. Mea culpa.

We are probably forgetting Harold Bloom's 'The Canon' which is a similar attempt to forge a common body of knowledge of the great works of civilization.

Of course Bloom, like Alan Bloom, has some nasty stuff in his past-- read Germain Greer (can't remember, I think it was her who was a grad student in his department). But such predation is not uncommon even amongst 'liberal' academics: maybe the instrumentalists are right, that it's power that counts.

But these are all (probably doomed) attempts to reclaim a body of common culture knowledge values and understanding, and communicate it to the next generation.

Frightening how few of the books in 'the Canon' I have actually read-- although I would probably throw in Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler, more dead white European males ;-).

Bloom died of AIDS in 1992. Despite Saul Bellow's novelization of him in Ravelstein, most people remain ignorant of just how compromised he was by the thing he scorned: the sexual revolution.

The trouble with ideas(!) is not that they're without value but that they have to account for some share of the social reality that would contain them. People started have lots of promiscuous sex for a reason, not the least of which was the ease of doing so. Let's thank global capitalism for that. Or we can decide people had bad ideas(!) and should be tongue-lashed by miserable old hypocrites. One explanation, at least, has a basis in empirical reality. The other is just the intellectualized scorn of a blowhard.

*

Bloom should have just gotten rich. That's always the best solution for thinkers out of step with the herd.

"Hirsch put his wheel to the grindstone" - man, when you put that wheel back on the cart, you're going to have a bumpy ride.

Bellow's lightly fictionalized memoir of Bloom, Ravelstein, is a fascinating work. It's clear that Bloom was a monster. What's not clear is whether Bellow understood that he was blackening his best friend's reputation.

mhr

Bernard Lewis is not a good choice of icon to recommend someone. The man has sold his soul to the neocons, for very little silver. His understanding of the moslem world is patronising and indeed anti-semitic (in the true sense of the word ie that Arabs are semites).

Bloix

I am not sure 'monster' is quite the right word for Bloom and not sure how you derive that from the book? It's an affectionate, if unvarnished, portrait.

The success of the Straussians in Washington circles has much to do with Alan Bloom. Even though Leo Strauss was the thinker, Bloom, the disciple, was the teacher.

Bob m

Bloom indeed was financially well off, at the end, as a result of the success of his book. An aesthete, he probably spent most of it, but as he was childless and gay, so what?

I think the appeal of someone like Bloom lay in his willingness to challenge lazy dogmatic relativism. When I was in college in the late '80s, it was sort of a facile article of faith among many academics in the humanities that there was no such thing as a better or worse answer to any question of ethics, politics, or metaphysics, and that anyone who believed in such things was either laughably parochial or authoritarian or both. (Either affliction could be cured by reading Derrida.) Of course, these academics had their own ethical, political, and metaphysical beliefs, including the belief in relativism, which they held to with dogmatic fervor. Failing to examine your assumptions is just not the way to address serious questions. Bloom was trying to say that the best way to examine those assumptions is to engage in a critical reading of Western philosophical classics. I don't think his answer was completely right, but it wasn't completely wrong either. We can learn something important about ourselves and our culture from a careful, patient reading of Plato, Aristotle, Macchiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and so forth. And dogmatic relativism isn't automatically wise just because dogmatic absolutism is unwise. There are more than just those two options. It always annoyed me that my fellow liberals couldn't see that.

On his Republic translation, I agree with Anderson that it is useful for those who don't know Greek. The translation is very democratic that way. I found it useful as an undergraduate and early graduate student, mostly for the index so that I could find recurring Greek terms quickly. That translation and the other Straussian translations of Plato were a reaction against a tradition of Plato scholarship and translation that largely ignored two important facts about the Dialogues: one, that they were written as dialogues -- dramas -- not treatises, and two, that Plato by and large wrote very carefully. Translation inevitably involves interpretation, and the fact that both Greek and English have idioms doesn't mean that there's an English idiomatic equivalent for each Greek idiom, or even close. That's the reason for Bloom's literalism: he was trying to write in a passable English that reflected as closely as possible the structure of the Greek. The translation was supposed to look foreign and strange, and it did, but it had its place all the same. Much of the criticism of it was from disciples of the British classics tradition who didn't have any explanation at all for the dramatic structure of Plato's writings, and had never even thought about the issue.

As for the political side of Bloom and the other pop-Straussians, I don't have any use for that. It's unfortunate that a teaching about the interpretation of philosophical texts became the basis for a cabal of neo-conservative warmongers and propagandists. And it's not purely accidental, either. But it doesn't mean we have to hate Allan Bloom's translation of Plato.

It's the same idea as "Culture Of Complaint" by Robert Hughes, which the general run of ignorant Americans used to beat "libruls" over the head. What people want is not an original, thoughtful book. What they want is a book that will put an intellectual veneer or cloak over their preconceived, intolerant notions.

After finishing such books, these dolts then turn to carping about how mystified and grossed-out they are by the ads and the models in "Vanity Fair" and "Vogue":

"Is that supposed to be attractive?"
"Does anyone really wear anything like this?"
"Why are they posing like that?"

For God's sake, people, it's an ad, it's a look, it's a pose. Who cares???? Stop going on about "Vogue" or these dumb books as if you've never seen an ad before in the past 40-70 years. Have you never had a thought in your heads? Does the latest hackwork by Robert Hughes or Allan Bloom, etc., really shock, surprise, and delight you with it's lame, trite, cliched ideas masquerading as profound newfound truths?

No apostrophe in "its." I know this. I wish there were an edit function here to save delicate souls like myself from complete embarrassment. (Tee-hee. Giggle.)

Anon

What a wonderful compedium of straw men.

You almost proved Bloom's and Hughes' point, in your rant.

FWIW I think Hughes has something to say which is often more profound than what Bloom says.

Mr. Toad

Excellent and balanced analysis. Thank you.

It's possible to have conservative leanings on many issues, and yet to think the neocon war cabal is a travesty of American (or anyone else's) conservatism. Read Andrew Sullivan or Andrew Bacevich.

That book was practically required reading back when I was in college in the late 80s.

I recall thinking that he had some interesting points, but he pretty much ruined the whole thing when he started up with the get-off-my-lawn crap about how rock and roll is ruining young minds, blah blah blah. Until that point I was mostly taking him seriously.

Value Thinker, i was at college in the early '70s as were, of course, all of my friends. we went to a wide diversity of schools.

and your summary of life on campus in the early '70s is simply not accurate, on any level.

the get-off-my-lawn crap about how rock and roll is ruining young minds

Just one picture of someone named Kid Rock convinced me. No rants are needed.

"And as long as I'm on the subject of books, a few days ago I finished Brendan Koerner's Now The Hell Will Start, a pretty good book that suffers from a bad title (though, of course, YMMV on whether the title grabs you). Once you get past the title and a clunky first few pages, though, it's a helluva good read about how black soldiers were treated during WWII and what one of them did about it."

The man in question sounds like a fragile reed--most black soldiers from WW2 will be more than happy to tell you how they got through their hitches in a Jim Crow army without getting addicted or murdering officers.

Just as many CBI vets will tell how much they would preferred building roads to fighting the Japanese. There are many memoirs, but this is among the best:
http://www.amazon.com/Quartered-Safe-Out-Here-Recollection/dp/0002726874/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218470267&sr=1-2

I don't think Valuethinker's assertion that Classicists were down on Bloom because they didn't want a Political Scientist stealing their turf. In point of fact another Chicago social scientist of the same period, James Redfield, wrote a book on Homer (now in a second edition) that bashed classicists in the preface, probably somewhat unfairly, but has been well received in classics because (a) it's a good book and (b) it brings the insights of another discipline to bear in a way that makes classicists see what they're doing in a new way. Bloom's book fails on both scores.

Mr. Toad's two points about Plato have been cliches in classical studies since Henri Etienne. Maybe one could make a point that Cornford's once popular translation ignored them, or rather chose a different translation strategy, but that's it.

One of the very peculiar things among Bloom's admirers is that they seem totally ignorant that the last thirty years have been a golden age of first rate scholars of, or in, classical philosophy producing first rate books that, while challenging, speak to the general reader on significant general issues from a thorough professional competence in classical philosophy (which, due to the nature of the beast, is likely to include Sophocles and Thucydides as well as strictly philosophical writers). One might mention Martha Nussbaum (whose review in the NYRB has always appealed to me by beginning with Musonius Rufus), and perhaps her book on Hellenistic philosophy even more than The Fragility of Goodness, Julia Annas, Bernard Williams, and whole shelves of collections by Gregory Vlastos or G E R Lloyd.

And the deep dirty secret is that, in spite of what one might gather from Bloom or Camille Paglia, Jean-Pierre Vernant's works, mostly available in English, are both revolutionary and first rate.

Now you may disagree with him --- you may believe that the period during which he claims kids soak up facts is not so; you may believe that teenagers can so understand, say, a newspaper article about US-Japan relations even though they know pretty much nothing about WW2 --- but IMHO he made a sufficiently compelling case that I'd require a rather stronger argument against his views than "well I don't think so". Posted by: Maynard Handley

Predictably, I heard George Will make a similar comment a couple decades ago. It is valid. Teaching kids "how" to think about something is fine, but only if they have some sort of historical/factual knowledge to ground analytical skills.

2/3 through Dark Side. It's raining Gestapo agents in an appalling account of how those who don't torture, do and how it came about. (It Can't Happen Here - oh yeah?) I'm hurrying on to Suskind's The Way of the World.

2/3 through Dark Side. It's raining Gestapo agents in an appalling account of how those who don't torture, do and how it came about. (It Can't Happen Here - oh yeah?) I'm hurrying on to Suskind's The Way of the World.

"Think back. You had classrooms occupied, you had picketing of unpopular professors. Voices of dissent to the orthodox consensus were silenced. You couldn't get up on campus and support the Vietnam War, say, or criticise communism as evil. In many ways, this was more a feature of the 1970s than the 60s campus."

Looking back on academia in its more conservative phases through the 1950's, I'm not sure that ideological rigidity was exactly brought about by the New Left. The Ivy League minus Columbia, for example, kept a strict cap on the number of Jewish students it would accept and Yale publicly admitted to shrinking its entering class for a few years as a way to shrink the Jewish population in the student body. The overall number of minority students was low and lots of schools were male-only. You could be kicked out of school for being gay or experimenting. Students got into schools based more on "breeding" than on merit. If you keep out everyone who might think differently and limit the student body to the elite, it's easy for a school to have the veneer of respectability that was later destroyed by 60's left agitators. Even up to the 1990's, schools like BU kicked out students for organizing campaigns to pull BU money out of university investments. A lot of the writers who were considered respectable in the 1950's were just pure bigots who cloaked their racism, sexism and anti-Semitism in the language of academic respectability. Samuel Morison (if I remembered his name correctly) of Harvard won the Pulitzer for a work that was little more than hero worship of Columbus that pretty much stated that although Columbus committed genocide, he was awesome.

In addition, guys like Chalmers Johnson supported the Vietnam War while teaching at Berkeley and also doing analysis for the CIA in the 1960's and are now darlings of the Left.

Steve

Actually that rant is probably more true than most.

Bloom's point is that the modern media world 'jams' clear thought. And if we think of puerality of modern rock lyrics and beat, that is abundantly true. One could argue that is true of any generation's popular music (although I have a considerable soft spot for Celtic folk music in general, the 'rock and roll' of the day and place) but given that Plato argued of the centrality of music to the education of the philosopher, we can see where Bloom is coming from.

It's fair to say youth are never going to listen to classical music with the same alacrity. But just as there is a difference between reading Dickens and watching Big Brother, so there is a difference between listening to just about any rock musician one would care to name (yes even REM ;-)) and listening to Mozart.

It's ironic that one of the things Bloom says which actually makes some sense (if we surround ourselves with crap and noise, it dulls and deadens us) is true.

I've grown up with a generation now that has no appreciation of classical music or literature (and I have big lacunae in that regard as well) and it shows, and it shows in the level of our cultural discourse. The crude obviousness and clumsiness of 90% of Hollywood's output (more like 99%) for example, so that 'The Dark Knight' is somehow heralded as this masterpiece, when actually it's an ugly, violent and noisy movie.

Gene O'Grady

The grift/ insight into classical philosophy is good-- thanks. Note though that Bloom wrote over 20 years ago, thus missing much of what you talk about.

Also that the very debate here (about the accuracy of his translation of the Republic) precisely shows the 'classicist' viewpoint vs. what he was trying to do (which was present the ideas of the book in a way a non-Greek reading audience could grasp with). Here, he is being dismissed for that, but it is actually a useful effort. Linguistically we might have our doubts, but I remember at the time that the other translations of the Republic then in print absolutely reflected the translator's (usually Anglo-centric) view of Greek politics and variously interpreted the words to fit that (no, I don't read classical Greek).

howard

I attended enough public seminars and classes in the 1970s to know that yes, indeed, that is what some campuses, at least, were like-- all the way down to screaming denunciations of 'conservative' profs or viewpoints. And I had enough friends in graduate school, or who became professors, to say yes that many humanities departments did come to be dominated by Marxist cliques.

It was the hubristic triumph of the left, as always, just as the world was turning against it.

Reality man

Chalmers Johnson has changed sides so you can't fault the left for liking him. What is interesting is how similar what he says is to Andrew Bacevich, who undoubtedly is/was a conservative. CJ is more like a Daniel Ellsberg character.

Of course 50s and 60s academe was a creature of McCarthyian and Eisenhowerian conservatism and the social exclusionism of many universities (I think as a result, CUNY was a hotbed of leftist thought-- all those Jewish Trotskyites). There were still some New Deal liberals wandering around (did Abba Lerner wind up in the UK?).

However there was a leftist orthodoxy that infected humanities (and some poli sci) departments as that generation of graduate students reached the academe, and in the polarised environment of Vietnam and post.

If you've ever been exposed to the Bolshevik tactics of the likes of Militant Tendency (which was very strong in the English academic community) you'll know what I mean: the masters of the committee meeting, the rewriting of history, the 'spontaneous demonstration' and the stuffing of the ballot box. Just because Mrs. T was objectionable and reactionary doesn't mean that Militant wasn't a grievous threat-- and not just within the Labour Party and the Trade Unions, but in academe as well.

2 wrongs don't make a right.

Gene O'Grady

You've nailed it. When we did The Republic, the other translation in print was The Cornford.

Maybe there had been or would be better ones, but that was the choice. I think the Cornford translation was the Penguin one?

The leftish polit sci profs used Cornford, we used Bloom.

I've just re-read Bloom's book and consider it as interesting to read now as when I first read it.

One of the best jokes is that 99% of the criticism of the book comes from people who've never got past the first couple chapters, if even that much.

The first half of the book is fluff. The second half I think is an excellent explanation of the phenomena described in the first part.

Gene O'Grady,

Although I haven't worked in that field in a while, I have read some Nussbaum, and Vlastos, and Annas. "Golden age" is putting it a bit strongly, I think. The fact that Nussbaum is able to drop the name of Musonius Rufus doesn't impress me, either because I'm a philistine or because I draw a distinction between trivia and philosophy. I know who Sidney Bechet was, but that doesn't make me a clarinet player.

In any event, I wasn't trying to say that Allan Bloom had discovered some new way of reading Plato. He was just applying, and popularizing to some extent, other people's ideas, especially those of Strauss. I was trying to say that the way many classicists and scholars of ancient philosophy taught and wrote about Plato in the mid-20th century was boring and unphilosophical and focused on arguments to the exclusion of the characters, settings, and actions of the Dialogues. This was partly a reflection of the types of writing that British and American academics took to be philosophically serious in those days. I agree that people like Nussbaum and Vlastos are better about this. But if you're right that scholars have been giving serious consideration to the dramatic structure of the dialogues since Stephanus, I'd like to hear of a few examples. Most of what I've seen in that vein is pretty superficial.

Vernant looks interesting. Thanks for the tip.

Toad

I can explain why I purchased this book, I mistook Allan Bloom for Harold Bloom. What a blooming idiot.

Part of the problem of gauging Bloom's effects is that we are trying to recreate atmospheres- ill-defined ones. Are we recreating the mood of a[ny given] academic field in the 70s, or 80s? American culture? The 'culture wars'? Bill Bennett? Smart undergrads at a[ny given] university in 1988 or 1991? I'd suggest going back to the original post and discussing the actual book- which I looked at in the course of giving to charity about a year ago. I agree with the post.

The problem is the weakness of starting from literary theory if you want to write about society: it might be better stated, but the price is that it amounts to anecdotes, or the best bar conversation in human history. A political theorist is trained mostly to engage in arguments about the good society; I think the way Straussians do it is pretty weird, but I'm not a theorist. An intellectual historian is trained mostly to write about the histories of such arguments among the most articulate people. Bloom was of those two camps, to whatever degree.

So what does he know about American society? Well, he had access to a great library, but he is not exactly applying the scientific method to his claims (I think science is part of the problem for him). His claims about how minds, media, society etc. work are highly unlikely to be as good as claims made by people who benefit from more than a century of large-scale specialized work on the issues. He could have benefited from the work, but that wasn't really his agenda.

The people who spend their time trying to learn things about American society, and developing ways to do it, are in the social sciences- sociology, economics, complex systems, statistics, public health, political science outside theory, etc. You have to have a truly radical faith in the individual to believe that they haven't made some progress in data handling and identifying good arguments relative to a lone theorist.

Scott,

I agree that social criticism such as Bloom's often ends up being empirically undisciplined and largely anecdotal. "The best bar conversation in human history" is a great line. It's hard for a scholar in the humanities to amount to anything more than a raconteur.

However, I can't agree with your general point -- if this is your claim -- that number-crunching disciplines ultimately do a better job of explaining human beings than literature and philosophy do. At a minimum, the social sciences also have their faults. Massive amounts of information aren't worth much without conceptual discipline, aesthetic receptiveness, and serious questioning of presuppositions. I mean, how has the fiction of a rational actor persisted as long as it has in economics, for example? It's not even good empiricism, as the behavioral economists have shown. And social-science disciplines like psychology seem no less slaves to fashion than literary theory does. Well, not much less, anyway. But with that caveat -- yes, there are much more responsible ways to answer the question of what effect rock music has on kids' intelligence than to apply a biased perspective to a handful of University of Chicago undergrads.

In the same boat is Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism. He relies on contemporary fiction to diagnose the ills of American life in the 1970s, forgetting that most contemporary novelists are neurotic sh*ts and that fiction is not most people's life.

I expect a similar right-wing book about bloggers.

sara

Again I thought Lasch had something to say.

It's axiomatic amongst cultural historians that we can read Dickens, or Jane Austen, say, and learn something about 19th century or 18th century England.

After the whole 60s thing, the 70s really was very self centred and self fulfilling (the 80s was worse: we had a political ideology that defined that as 'good') and self destructive. Not all of course, it's when the urban regeneration movements (I don't mean the city planners devastating blocks to build projects in the 60s, I mean the grassroots activism, urban gardens etc.) and the environmental movement really got going.

Mr. Toad

Your analysis is consistently excellent (or at least I agree with it ;-). I don't think a lot of what Bloom said was right, but the approach the Straussians championed of dense, careful textual reading, was a good one which academic scholarship had abandoned (has it still?).

The bitter reality is that now, even more than then, for students a degree is an economic tool: there is even less time in the frenetic activity of getting a business studies degree, an economics degree, getting into law school, getting those all important internships that lead to a job at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey....

even less time to actually read, and think and consider.

And the humanities themselves are driven by a ruthless focus on intense detailed studies 'books about song birds in northern Pennsylvania in the Antebellum era'. Publish or perish. Publish or perish.

It's even harder, I think, and tragically so, to persuade kids why they should spend time reading Thucydides or Hobbes, to think about what the ideal state is.

Political science itself seems to have drifted away from any connection with its philosophical roots.

sara

I should add, though, that for zeitgeist, I like genre fiction over 'mainstream' fiction.

Newton Thornburg (Cutter & Bone, To die in California) or George V. Higgins (Friends of Eddie Coyle) over any number of 'serious' novels. Or Jim Thompson's 'Briarpatch'.

It seems to me the 70s was all about crime, about drugs, about political chicanery, about the stealthy rise of the right which would come full bloom in the 80s, taking the liberal intelligentsia by complete surprise. It was about Nixon, and the CIA, and a collapse in the faith that the American government was actually acting on behalf of its people.

And it is thrillers that tell that story. That great brawling story of America losing its youth.

I don't know if the great American novel of the 1970s has been written, but I am seeking it in the thrillers, rather than in the 'serious' novels.