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Sunday, September 04, 2005
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De mortuis… There’s a strange sort of tribute to Allan Bloom in today’s New York Times. Jim Sleeper quotes, among other statements from The Closing of the American Mind , one that UD has already quoted on this blog . Sleeper quotes it in part; I’ll quote it again in full: Nothing prevents us from thinking too well of ourselves. It is necessary that there be an unpopular institution in our midst that sets clarity above well-being or compassion, that resists our powerful urges and temptations, that is free of all snobbism but has standards. These and so many other beautifully turned out sentences from that book (Bloom was a great stylist, something I’ve always figured must have been an element in his and Saul Bellow’s affinity) are precisely the sort of thinking and writing you get when clarity is indeed the primary goal of education. Bloom’s language modeled the sort of chiseled mind that people are supposed to gain from a truly liberal college experience. No doubt an important part of his book’s huge success was simply the intense pleasure to be had reading its prose. No one but UD, of course, has ever been much interested in the sheer writerly facility of The Closing. The book stands as the most excoriated best-seller of its time. Detesting it became an article of faith for academics all over the United States. Its title still stands as shorthand among professors for everything loathsome about reactionary America. And yet, and yet, and yet. Sleeper’s essay this morning marks another moment in a subterranean narrative UD has been tracking for awhile now, in which academics on the left acknowledge complex and conflicted feelings about Bloom’s book. The man they used to dismiss as a hypocritical son of a bitch (He was a gay marauder! But he was conservative!) now turns out to have had very smart and true things to say about the university. One left academic recently wrote of his “love/hate relationship” with Allan Bloom, whose attack on the vulgar materialism of American capitalism and the curricular absurdity of the American college seems after all to have been powerful and true and worth keeping. Sleeper suggests that even when it came out, a lot of professors were “reading The Closing under their bedcovers with flashlights, unable either to endorse or repudiate it but sensing that some reckoning was due.” While the professorial timidity described here rings true, Sleeper’s wrong. When Bloom’s book first appeared, professors fell all over each other to befoul it. The professors with flashlights under their covers were reading Angela Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Woman . In this latest discovery of Bloom’s merits, Sleeper wants to argue that Bloom warned as much against the excesses of an unreasoning right as of an unreasoning left. Which is certainly true, and has always been true, and which makes one wonder why Bloom continues to be tagged a neofascist by the professoriate. Sleeper quotes Roger Kimball saying something that would have been anathema to Allan Bloom: “Many parents are alarmed, rightly so,” Kimball has written, by their children coming back from college and tossing out “every moral, religious, social and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe.” Sleeper’s absolutely right that Bloom wanted students to be shocked out of a passive dependency upon inherited truths and into an autonomous working out of a personal philosophy. So yes, the appropriation of Bloom by the cultural right is as lamentable as the abuses he’s endured from the left. But Sleeper is certainly unfair when he performs the following fascist-by-association routine: Conservatives who reread Bloom will also discover that the 60’s left reminded him also of the right-wing hordes his mentor Leo Strauss had encountered in Europe in the 30’s. ‘The fact that in Germany the politics were of the right and in the United States of the left should not mislead us. In both places the universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements,” whose participants, full of animal spirits and spiritual animus, undertook, “the dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry.” Yet Kimball and Horowitz themselves are trying to rouse a mass movement of alumni, the public and legislatures to “take back” the university. This is palpably unfair and rhetorically shabby. And Sleeper goes astray when he suggests that Bloom rejected spiritual seriousness. Bloom found the more simple-minded modes of American religious faith inadequate, but his book is after all a “meditation on the state of our souls,” and the word “souls” appears not only in his subtitle but throughout the book. Like Gore Vidal, Vladimir Nabokov, and many other thoughtful people, Bloom had no use for the conventional religion of his day, but plenty of interest in earlier and richer modes of spiritual life. |