The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students

“[R]elativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life. […] The point [of the new curriculum] is to propagandize acceptance of different ways, and indifference to their real content is as good a means as any.” 

Bloom argues that relativism negates the traditional moral purpose of liberal education, which is to discover what is good and true through the rational investigation of nature and human cultures. Education always embodies a moral aim; in a democratic society, the aim is to produce citizens useful for democracy who espouse the ideals and master the skills conducive to the preservation of the democratic system. The agenda of many university courses introducing students to non-Western cultures is to promote the idea that all cultures and belief systems are equally valid, thus promoting the ideology of tolerance. These courses rarely grapple with the real ideological contradictions and ethnocentrism of other cultures and encourage superficial appreciation rather than serious and critical analysis.  

“Nature should be the standard by which we judge our own lives and the lives of people. That is why philosophy, not history or anthropology, is the most important human science.” 

Bloom rejects the idea that knowledge is a social construct unavoidably conditioned by ideological interests and power relations. This view, popularized by Nietzsche, holds that there is no objective reality, only subjective interpretation. Bloom insists that reason can discover essential truths about nature, including human nature, that can form the basis for rational moral and ethical judgments. Human identity, behavior, and social structures exist within a framework of natural law that should be the standard by which to evaluate them.

“Thus there are two kinds of openness, the openness of indifference—promoted with the twin purposes of humbling our intellectual pride and letting us be whatever we want to be, just as long as we don’t want to be knowers—and the openness that invites us to the quest for knowledge and certitude, for which history and the various cultures provide a brilliant array of examples for examination.” 

Bloom distinguishes between the false “openness” of relativism and the genuine openness of liberal-minded inquiry in search of authentic truth. The facile moral equivalencies of relativism conceal an unwillingness to stake a claim to what is correct. Moral judgments have consequences and demand action that can lead to conflict, which we want to avoid today. The openness that avoids conflict, the openness of tolerant indifference, is morally contemptuous, Bloom argues. 

“Young Americans seemed, in comparison, to be natural savages when they came to the university. They had hardly heard the names of the writers who were the daily fare of their counterparts across the Atlantic.” 

Compared with their European peers, American students know virtually nothing about the Western philosophical and literary tradition before entering university. The European secondary school curriculum offers a breadth of instruction in the humanities typically reserved for college-level education in the United States. Most European students are immersed in the great books and authors of the Western tradition from an early age at home and in school, enabling them to achieve a level of cultural, aesthetic, and personal sophistication far in advance of their American counterparts.

“The psychological obtuseness of our students is appalling, because they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like, and the range of their motives.” 

American youth’s understanding of psychology and human motivation is simplistic, relying for the most part on examples and stereotypes drawn from the media and popular psychology. Unacquainted with the models of human behavior and character offered by the literary canon, the heights and depths of the soul and the complexities of the human condition are oblivious to them.

“The music business […] reveals the nature of all our entertainment and our loss of a clear view of what adulthood or maturity is […].” 

Bloom lambastes the rock music industry for shamelessly pandering to the infantile sexual desires of children, who fantasize living the dissolute lives of their androgynous heroes. The narcissistic illusions and crude sexuality advertised by rock lyrics and performers demonstrate the dominance of the pleasure principle in the lives of American youth. For Bloom, rock is an unvarnished evil, damaging the imagination, intellect, and moral character of children, akin to drug abuse.

“Country, religion, family, ideas of civilization, all the sentimental and historical forces that stood between cosmic infinity and the individual, providing some notion of a place within the whole, have been rationalized and have lost their compelling force. America is experienced not as a common project but as a framework within which people are only individuals, where they are left alone.” 

A sense of isolation and alienation characterizes life in America today. The crisis in our education and the narcissism of our youth are the inevitable result of the American principle of individualism in an age when the institutional frameworks and energies that once played a formative role in creating social identity have lost their traditional influence and power. In the post-Vietnam era, Bloom argues, American students have abandoned political engagement and retreated to a self-centered listlessness, ironic and detached from larger social concerns. 

“Affirmative action now institutionalizes the worst aspects of separatism. The fact is that the average black student’s achievements do not equal those of the average white student in the good universities, and everybody knows it. [… T] he university degree of a black student is also tainted, and employers look on it with suspicion, or become guilty accomplices in the toleration of incompetence.”

Bloom is extremely critical of affirmative action programs, which he argues have stigmatized and disadvantaged, rather than helped, Black students. A result of affirmative action and the Black Power movement has been to encourage black separatism rather than integration on campus. Black studies programs, moreover, have elevated political activism and empowerment narratives over intellectual rigor and have been mostly an intellectual failure. As a result, Black students’ education has suffered, and their social integration within university life has been stymied.

“[O]ne must begin to wonder whether there is any permanent literature for them, because there do not seem to be any permanent problems for them. [… T]he result is not the cultivation of the vastest sympathies for long ago and far away, but rather an exclusive interest in themselves.” 

American youth no longer feel that serious literature has anything worthwhile to offer them, whether pleasure or wisdom. The relaxation of sexual attitudes in contemporary culture has largely de-problematized the erotic sphere, with the result that students are unable to relate to literature about the collision of social forces and sexual desire, such as Romeo and Juliet, Madame Bovary, and Anna Karenina. Coddled, entitled, and lacking appreciation for social and historical situations alien to their own experience, today’s youth are self-centered and self-satisfied. 

“The aptest description I can find for the state of students’ souls is the psychology of separateness.” 

The breakdown of traditional affiliations to religion, family, and country has resulted in a psychology of rootlessness and alienation among youth. To compensate for this groundlessness, they desperately seek commitment, some sense of fixed attachment, to attain a feeling of stability in today’s individualistic and narcissistic culture. 

“[T]he most important and astonishing phenomenon of our time, all the more astonishing in being almost unnoticed [… is] an entirely new language of good and evil, originating in an attempt to get ‘beyond good and evil’ and preventing us from talking with any conviction about good and evil anymore. […] The new language is that of value relativism, and it constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism.” 

Bloom argues that late-20th-century America has adopted the language associated with the critique of values pioneered by Nietzsche and developed by German social philosophers and psychologists connected to the Frankfurt School and Freudianism. Good and evil, as moral absolutes, have been replaced by the language of “values” and “conflict resolution,” which suppose the relativity and subjectivity of all value beliefs. This epochal shift represents an escape from the distressing moral tension caused by the intractable conflict between good and evil, which is non-negotiable. “Values,” by contrast, are insubstantial and relatively easy to adjust; they enable what Bloom terms “comfortable self-preservation” in a world of competing opinions (142).

“The respectable and accessible nobility of man is to be found not in the quest for or discovery of the good life, but in creating one’s own ‘life-style,’ of which there is not just one but many possible, none comparable to another. He who has a ‘life-style’ is in competition with, and hence inferior to, no one […]. All this has become everyday fare in the United States, and the most popular schools of psychology and their therapies take value positing as the standard of healthy personality.” 

Once values seem relative and the search for objective truth in moral matters is abandoned as an illusory quest, one demonstrates one’s creativity and independence by fashioning a lifestyle that expresses one’s inclinations and personal values. “Life-style” is a term coined by the sociologist Max Weber; it is value-neutral, implicitly condoning any belief or behavior without regard to objective notions of right or wrong, good or bad. Psychotherapy supports this idea, counseling that acceptance of oneself, rather than trying to adjust to societal norms, is the key to happiness and the mark of the authentic personality.

“[O]n the basis of the variety of readings of the French Revolution—by monarchists, Catholics, liberals, socialists, Robespierreans, Bonapartists—which were not idle academic exercises but life-forming and action-engendering, Nietzsche concluded that there was no text here but only interpretation. This observation is the foundation of the currently popular view that there is no is but only perspectives on becoming, that the perception is as much reality as there is, that things are what they are perceived to be. This view is, of course, allied with the notion that man is a value-creating, not a good-discovering, being.” 

The rejection of objective fact in favor of the importance of perception is the lesson Nietzsche drew from his study of the French Revolution. The act of interpretation supplants the historical event, or text, that is its ostensible object and becomes the primary phenomenon of experience. Interpretation is creative; it generates world-views, which in turn create or transform cultures. Nietzsche’s deconstruction of truth results in the perspectivism that currently dominates many disciplines—legal studies, history, critical theory, literary studies, political philosophy, etc. The philosophy of perspectivism, moreover, underwrites a philosophy of becoming rather than of being. Interpretation is endlessly fluid and creative; thus reality is not fixed but in continual flux.

“The ambiguity of human life always requires that there be distinctions between good and bad, in one form or another. The great change is that a good man used to be the one who cares for others, as opposed to the man who cares exclusively for himself. Now the good man is the one who knows how to care for himself, as opposed to the man who does not. […] Selfishness is presupposed; men are not assumed to be as they ought to be, but as they are.” 

A major inflection point in the history of Western philosophy and psychology occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries, the age of Rationalism and the Enlightenment. The Christian idea of the soul was replaced by the concept of the self as the essence of the personality. The soul, metaphysical and theological in origin, strove for virtue against the animal desires of the body, with which it was bound in an impossible unity. With the rise of the new natural philosophy and Newtonian physics, the self was discovered to be a natural entity, not endowed with a longing for transcendence but with feelings, bodily desires, and the instinct for self-preservation. Selfishness was recognized as natural and respectable, and the self-interested industrious man became the model citizen and focal point of political theory. Bloom explains that Hobbes and Locke pioneered this new image of the individual, rationally pursuing his own self-interest, which the new system of political liberalism would enable to thrive in an egalitarian society of like-minded others.

“Nietzsche surveyed and summed up the contradictory strands of modern thought and concluded that victorious rationalism is unable to rule in culture or soul, that it cannot defend itself theoretically and that its human consequences are intolerable. This constitutes a crisis of the West, for everywhere in the West, for the first time ever, all regimes are founded on reason.” 

Nietzsche dismantled the Enlightenment faith in the supremacy of reason, realizing that only religion, or the mythmaking function of man, could generate the compelling life-affirming values that create and sustain societies. Loss of belief in God sets the stage for nihilism, and the modern individual has lost the capacity to value, to create and believe in gods that are the deified objectifications of human power and desire. The belief that man can find happiness through science and reason is an illusion, as is the rationalist dream of the “self-evident” truth that all men are created equal. A regime founded solely on reason, like liberal democracy, is incapable of meeting the deeper existential needs that religion answers; hence it is vulnerable to collapse.

“Since values are not rational and not grounded in the natures of those subject to them, they must be imposed. They must defeat opposing values. […] Commitment is the moral virtue because it indicates the seriousness of the agent. Commitment is the equivalent of faith when the living God has been supplanted by self-provided values.” 

According to Nietzsche and Weber, values arise from the irrational depths of the self. The creation of values is akin to myth-making; they are a product of the will, not of the rational search for truth. Since values are not grounded in a universal human nature, they inevitably come into conflict with the values of other cultures, which commonly results in war. What matters in a relativistic moral universe is commitment, not correspondence with objective truth. The content of the belief pales in comparison to the intensity of one’s commitment to it, which is the index of authenticity. Moral force belongs to those who demonstrate the most commitment, regardless of the potential for harm or good of their cause.

“Choice is all the rage these days, but it does not mean what it used to mean. [… W]hen the word still had some shape and consistency, a difficult choice meant to accept difficult consequences in the form of suffering, disapproval of others, ostracism, punishment and guilt. […] Now, when we speak of the right to choice, we mean that there are no necessary consequences, that disapproval is only prejudice, and guilt only a neurosis.” 

Bloom argues that avoiding conflict is the chief moral imperative today. Our insistence on freedom has become detached from any meaningful moral framework, so that everyone and every lifestyle must be accepted and celebrated on its own terms. We are indignant at any infringement upon our supposed liberty to do or be anything we want, and we want risk-free choices. However, the difficulty of morally complicated choices and the consequences they necessarily entail confer dignity on human action. When choices are consequence-free and the individual self is assumed to be the arbiter of all values, answering to no greater authority than itself, dignity and respectability are impossible. 

“‘Life-style’ justifies any way of life, as does ‘value’ any opinion. […] Sex is no longer an activity but a cause. In the past there was a respectable place for marginality, bohemia. But it had to justify its unorthodox practices by its intellectual and artistic achievement. Life-style is so much freer, easier, more authentic and democratic. No attention has to be paid to content.” 

The language of moral relativism makes self-affirmation and the celebration of identity an absolute good, regardless of their content. The bedroom becomes a stage for political as well as sexual liberation, and all sexual tastes and practices are acceptable if the participants derive pleasure from them. Non-conforming behavior no longer needs to justify itself; its very expression is a celebration of diversity and counter-culture. We have lost the capacity for serious moral reflection, Bloom argues; rather than thinking through our actions in the light of reason and principle, we are encouraged simply to affirm our values and individuality through our lifestyle. Repression and self-suppression are the only evils today, and self-assertion is equated with moral virtue.

“The university is the place where inquiry and philosophic openness come into their own. It is intended to encourage the noninstrumental use of reason for its own sake, to provide the atmosphere where the moral and physical superiority of the dominant will not intimidate philosophic doubt. And it preserves the treasury of great deeds, great men and great thoughts required to nourish that doubt.” 

Bloom’s definition emphasizes the modern university’s philosophical debt to Enlightenment thought. The university in a democratic society has a corrective and compensatory function: It is a sanctuary for the disinterested and unconstrained search for truth, it provides a safe space for thinking the unthinkable within a democratic regime, and it counters the public’s inclination for the ephemeral and trivial by conserving the remarkable achievements of the past.

“The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself, by being the model of true openness.” 

One of the paradoxes of liberal democracy is that reason, the ground of its basic principles, is at risk of being degraded to a prejudice within society. Tocqueville observed that democracy’s greatest danger is the tyranny of public opinion, which is unchecked by traditional sources of influence in civil society like the aristocracy or the church. The power of public opinion encourages conformism to the majority, just as the majority will is reflected in democratic political government. Reason too easily becomes a bias in a rational society, which threatens the intellectual openness and freedom of thought that reason must protect. The university, as the sanctuary of reason, must protect reason from becoming a prejudice, since reason is the only protection from prejudice, Bloom argues.

“The very special status of what came to be called academic freedom has gradually been eroded, and there hardly remains an awareness of what it means. […] Freedom of speech has given way to freedom of expression, in which the obscene gesture enjoys the same protected status as demonstrative discourse.” 

Bloom argues that the Enlightenment concept of academic freedom was originally intended to protect the right of a few intellectuals to the free exercise of reason without fear of prosecution or punishment by governmental or ecclesiastical authorities. Once reserved for special cases, academic freedom is now associated with self-interest—for example, employment security and other economic considerations in the academic marketplace. Similarly, freedom of speech was originally proposed as a safeguard of liberal democracy by allowing for the expression and deliberation of opinion and the cultivation of reason. The protection of free expression has progressively expanded in the United States to permit hate speech, fanaticism, and other offensive forms of expression that are anathema to the ideal of reason and the intentions of the Founders. 

“‘Intellectual honesty,’ ‘commitment,’ and that kind of thing have nothing to do with the university, belong in the arenas of religious and political struggle, only get in the way of the university’s activity, and open it to suspicion and criticism […]. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech were proposed in theory, and in the practice of serious political reformers, in order to encourage the still voice of reason in a world that has always been dominated by fanaticisms and interests. How freedom of thought and speech came to mean the special encouragement and protection of fanaticism and interests is another of those miracles connected with the decay of the ideal of the rational political order.” 

Bloom argues that the function of the university is not to employ its energies in the service of current political or religious aims but to examine and critique the passions of the present from the higher perspective of reason and tradition. The student protests of the 1960s attempted to politicize the university by forcing it to accommodate the political and social agenda pressed by the activists. The university’s special role is to serve as a sanctuary for freedom of thought and the free exercise of reason, which necessarily requires it preserve a disinterested position in the political skirmishes and ideological conflicts of the day. Insofar as universities concede to activists’ demands, Bloom claims, they abandon their special moral authority.

“The American university in the sixties was experiencing the same dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry as had the German university in the thirties. No longer believing in their higher vocation, both gave way to a highly ideologized student populace. And the content of the ideology was the same—value commitment. The university had abandoned all claim to study or inform about value—undermining the sense of the value of what it taught, while turning over the decision about values to the folk, the Zeitgeist, the relevant.” 

Bloom argues that the predicament facing the American university in the 1960s was essentially the same as that which afflicted the German universities under the Nazis. Both resulted from the crisis of values in modern philosophy. Having deconstructed the grounds of reason, the university became uncertain of its value and moral authority and, as a result, submitted in both countries to the fervent political commitments of the moment—those arising from the right in Germany, and from the left in the United States.