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Allan BloomThe Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
IntroductionChapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary: “Our Virtue”
Bloom argues that multiculturalism and moral relativism have severely eroded the purpose and quality of American higher education. Intended to promote the tolerance of diversity, relativism is the only “virtue” taught in American primary education. Students enter the university believing two things: Truth is relative, and equality is the essential American value. Acceptance of diversity requires we recognize that knowledge is the product of specific historical and cultural conditions and the biases that inevitably accompany them. To insist on the possibility of universal truth is tantamount to asserting the superiority of one culture to another, thereby opening the door to intolerance and discrimination. The lesson of history, according to this narrative, demonstrates that wars, slavery, racism, religious hatred, and xenophobia are fruits of the chauvinism by which one group claims possession of the truth while denigrating the beliefs and claims of other groups. “Openness” demands that moral absolutism and White privilege be rejected. The relativity of truth, however, is not an insight arrived at by reason but a moral position held by those convinced that it is the necessary condition of a free and equitable society.
This false idea of openness rejects the rational grounds of democracy and the spirit of free inquiry, championed by the Enlightenment, that seeks authentic truth. The celebration of diversity and relativism has displaced the older view of American identity based on the natural rights enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. By accepting as self-evident the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Americans found a basis of commonality that transcended class and national origin, enabling them to subordinate their particularities to a new principle of shared identity. Education today rejects this basis of national identity and the Founders’ solution to the problem of forging unity. Rather than assimilation, the new pedagogy emphasizes tolerance of all ideologies, cultures, lifestyles, and self-styled identities. Bloom suggests the social contract is no longer viable, however, without a vision of the common good, arguing that relativism undermines the political health of the nation as well as the traditional humanist values of liberal education.
Analyzing the idea of political freedom that originated with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Bloom notes an irresolvable contradiction: The expansion of individual liberty inevitably requires limiting the extent to which morality dictates policy. Personal freedom, pursued to its extreme, resists any moral constraint or societal norm that would restrict its exercise. The Founders attempted a compromise between the claims of liberty and civil society that would preserve the greatest degree of security while protecting individual freedom. Wary of factionalism and the religious conflicts that had plagued Europe, they held that religious choice was a matter of opinion, but the freedom to express one’s religion was a natural right—a matter of irrefutable knowledge. Provided you adhered to the laws of the state, you were free to practice any belief you chose.
However, the trend toward indiscriminate freedom in liberalism results in a paradox: The insatiable desire for personal freedom resists the restrictions knowledge proposes to regulate liberty, until it seems that complete freedom requires the elimination of any such knowledge at all. Radical democratic theory ultimately comes to see any constraint on liberty as tyrannical and arbitrary, and freedom itself becomes the only absolute, unrestricted by moral precepts or a sense of social responsibility. This form of liberalism results in a debased idea of tolerance. The pursuit of freedom without addressing the fundamental moral principles that determine its responsible enjoyment is the turn in liberalism that eventuates in today’s cultural relativism, Bloom claims.
Cultural relativism proposes indiscriminateness as a solution to the problem of diversity, since its opposite, according to its analysis, is discrimination. Indiscriminate tolerance is a misguided moral principle, however, since it prevents the rational critique that determines what is good and enables standards for living according to the good. Discovery of the good implies discovery (and rejection) of the bad, and such discriminations are reviled by relativism’s proponents as social aggressions that, while masquerading as legitimate judgments, serve to preserve the dominant power structure.
The Constitution, Bloom observes, does not guarantee respect for specific groups but protects the universal rights of individual human beings. For many, however, this protection is no longer enough, and the rise of relativism and its undermining of education has come at a great cost, impoverishing the minds of students and stifling intellectual freedom. Young Americans know much less about American history today and are taught that traditional ideas of the “good” and the “true” are simply veiled expressions of ideological partisanship. University courses on non-Western cultures serve a multiculturalist agenda of promoting tolerance rather than engaging students in genuine critical thinking. Indifferent to the real content of their subject, such courses substitute superficial appreciation for thoughtful engagement.
Bloom acknowledges ethnocentrism is a valuable means of self-definition and group solidarity. Similarly, he touts the humane benefits of studying other cultures and belief systems, which widens students’ perspectives. By reducing claims of what is true and correct to a relativistic haze, however, relativism disables reason’s goal of discovering truths about the nature of the good. Students draw a false conclusion from their multicultural studies; the fact that different cultures and times have generated divergent moral opinions does not mean that none of these ideas is true or superior to others. Real openness encourages serious, informed debate in the search for truth and certitude.
Introduction Analysis
Bloom argues that a fundamental yet largely unnoticed change in how Americans understand themselves and the grounds of their society has seriously damaged the quality of American education and the moral and intellectual health of its youth. This shift constitutes a social, political, and educational crisis that threatens the survival of our democracy although it is seemingly motivated by a desire to strengthen that democracy. The celebration of diversity sees relativism as a moral obligation, necessary to promote harmony in a multicultural egalitarian society. The danger, however, is that relativism prevents students from developing the nuanced perception, discrimination, and judgment that enable them to negotiate difficult problems and thoughtfully evaluate competing claims to truth. Relativism sidesteps the question of truth, insisting all cultural traditions and beliefs are equally valid and none is qualified to claim precedence. Students are taught that intolerance is the only evil and that the danger of absolutism is not error but intolerance. Bloom contends that the goal of liberal education is the discovery of truth in order to live the good life—a notion rooted in classical philosophy and the Western humanist tradition. Value relativism and the indiscriminate openness it sanctions has stripped education of this traditional moral purpose. The study of other cultures does not demonstrate that value judgments are relative; it merely imposes that presupposition upon the material of its study.
Bloom’s analysis of the moral and educational crisis posed by relativism concisely summarizes the reimagination of American identity that has occurred since World War I. He emphasizes the origins of our democracy in the Enlightenment doctrine of natural, inalienable rights—self-evident truths derived from reason and hence universally applicable (theoretically at least) to all men. By the middle of the 20th century, for a variety of political, cultural, and historical reasons, the idea of natural rights as the ground of freedom was replaced by the idea of cultural relativism. In place of the view of a melting pot in which differences were dissolved to create a new national identity, ensuring equal treatment for all now required respecting the diversity of the country’s racial, religious, ethnic, and (later) sexual identities. New trends in historical and social critique denounced the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as outmoded and racist constructs concealing ideological interests that preserved the privileged status of the White, Anglo-Saxon Founders, some of them slave owners. Relativism obviates the need for assimilation by envisioning a culture of tolerance in which diversity is validated. The emphasis on minority rights and identity politics, however, has led to a crisis of separatism in American society, Bloom contends.
As a moral postulate, relativism defeats the classic purpose of liberal education, which is to discover the good and true in order to live a better life. If all knowledge is a social construct embodying cultural biases, no natural basis exists for claims to universal truth, and thus no general standards are possible that would enable judgments based upon that truth. Following Plato and Aristotle, Bloom insists nature is discoverable through reason and that the rational investigation of human nature can produce authentic judgments about human behavior, a claim that runs counter to the anti-humanist trend of post-structuralist thought that swept through academia in the late 20th century.
The paradox of close-mindedness masquerading as “openness” is one of the many metaphors of Bloom’s critique. In his view, relativism denies reason’s special claim to knowledge, and the type of openness it promotes is really an indifference to moral distinctions and an aversion to the difficult evaluation of moral questions on rational principles. The ideal ofHH liberalism has been transformed into an attitude of “anything goes,” a betrayal of the rational principles underlying freedom of thought. The pernicious consequences of relativism extend beyond the corruption of a generation of American youth; as a nation founded on the principle of rationalism, America establishes reason as the “essential freedom that justifies the other freedoms, and on the basis of which […] much deviance is also tolerated” (39). Bloom warns that the complacent and dogmatic acceptance of relativism in morality, politics, and education threatens the very survival of American democracy by undermining its unique philosophical foundation.
