A little learning of the wrong things
Patrick Reyntiens
THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND by Allan Bloom
Simon & Schuster, £14.95
Though it may be a poignant misfor- tune, felo de se is no crime. But if one were to witness a nation's university system committing interior suicide should one label it merely a mistake ? Talleyrand is too cynical a mentor in such a case. The Closing of the American Mind is an account by Professor Allan Bloom of the de- bauching of teaching and administrative standards in American universities during the Sixties and Seventies. As befits a world authority on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his translator, Professor Bloom's writing is elegant, economical and lucid; it contrasts effectively with the content of what he has to say, which is hair-raising. His tale is a charting of the interaction of an ignorant student clientele with a morally culpable teaching faculty. From a box in the Ivy League Theatre, so to speak, Bloom wit- nessed the unfolding drama of mass cowar- dice on the part of the teaching profession when under physical threat. He saw this spiritual gangrene spread from those few elite universities down the limbs of the whole American university system. Statis- tics were falsified, rules were bent, stan- dards fell. Everyone picked up the conta- gion, so it seems.
The first part of the book is an exposé of the compartments of an average American student's mind on entry into the university. Far from that mind being a tabula rasa, which might give grounds for hope, it is apparently filled with the most appalling junk. This has to be cleared away before anything of worth can be put in its place. Unfortunately the junk, in the form of easy money, easy sex, uninterrupted tranny- pop, nil reading background and absence of historical perspective, builds up a bulk- head so extraordinarily gross in texture as to resist the mental penetration of even the most enthusiastic teacher.
Part two is a description of the progress of 'The German Connection' which is aptly entitled 'Nihilism, American Style'. Bloom sets out the terms on page one, i.e. to the sophisticated mind the appellations 'good' and 'evil' no longer mean anything; as a consequence decisions lack conviction and have weakened authority, everything is relative. Through Bloom's eyes we witness the superficial sophistication of the En- lightenment and the darker powers of Nietzschean-inspired nihilism profiting from the native gullibility found waiting for them to feed on in America. Fine, fine, until the storm comes, when it is found that the popularisation of German philosophy, from Hegel to Nietzsche and Heidegger is no basis for rational and moral decision, and no defence against subversive hysteria.
The third part of the book is devoted to the exfoliation of the university as it took shape historically in America. It is difficult - to determine in all this exactly where Allan Bloom himself stands from a philosophical point of view, and divining a solution to this personal question constitutes one of the main excitements in reading this part of the book.
In America the mediaeval university model was not adapted and there is conse- quently no reference to it in Bloom's book because of its irrelevance. However it is regrettable that, from what he has written, one could hardly infer the very existence of the mediaeval achievement. This is a pity, since had the mediaeval model been taken seriously, American universities might have been spared the debacle described by Bloom. Whatever its drawbacks the mediaeval university was understood as a polls independent of civil and military pressure. This was because it was con- ceived to lie within the protection of the Church which had already fought the battle for independence under Hildebrand a cen- tury before universities were thought of and won. This type of university still exists in Oxford and Cambridge; they are its lineal descendants and still bear its stamp of independence, however watered down. American myopia explains, perhaps, why the great apologist of the mediaeval ideal brought up to date, John Henry Newman, together with his defence, 'The Idea of University', are not mentioned either in.
Bloom's book. Had Newman been in- cluded, -there could have ensued a com- parison between what actually happened in the American universities during the Six- ties and Seventies and Newman's predic- tions, 130 years earlier, that similar situa- tions would indeed occur if certain hard and fast principles at the heart of the university were consciously evaded or ex- plained away.
The very last part of the book illumin- ates the encounter between the inspissate ignorance of the student body and the moral funk of the teaching faculty. It is a horrible story if you believe it; I find little reason to doubt it.
The underlying cause of all the trouble is that, in the end, Americans are so fright- fully, terribly, gullible. They would believe anything — but in serial, never two things together unless they were clean contradic- tory to one another. This is one of their most engaging traits. The ability to believe anything and anybody, turn and turn ab- out, is a relic of the old civilisation of 18th-century England, recognisable in the novels of Smollett and Fielding, which still persists in modern America. Americans still believe what they are told, i.e. testi- mony just as the personae of those novels did. What a field day newly resident German professors must have had in the 1930s; they surely could hardly have be- lieved their good fortune.
Nothing has changed for the better now, since only the object of Young America's gullibility has shifted, and for the worse, because, according to Professor Bloom, they are now largely enslaved to the vulgarest of amusements, guaranteed to debauch. His tentative solution is to start Americans reading again, reading 'Great Books'. This is, in theory, admirable would that England followed that advice— but in practice it is difficult to see how such an interest could be propagated at the appropriate time, since an ability to enjoy sustained reading has to be first acquired by tasting it at one's mother's knee, whilst being read to. I can't envisage American mothers, or English ones for that matter, doing anything so unfeminist and demean- ing.
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