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

Bloom sees the university as embodying the Socratic quest for knowledge of the truth in order to determine the good life. Its special instrument is reason, unaided and unhindered by political pressure, social prejudice, or religious superstition. Ideally, the university is a community of individuals animated by a common good, dedicated to the theoretical life and the disinterested use of reason, and granted special freedoms and status by society due to its mission. Bloom admits his lofty conception of the promise of the university has too rarely been fulfilled, but its inspiration has sustained him throughout his academic life.

The university as we know it today is a product of the Enlightenment project to understand the entirety of nature—the physical, animate, and human realms—as a unified structure of knowledge cognizable by reason.

Bloom argues that the Enlightenment was a political as well as a scientific project and that its political aim was to guarantee the security of its audacious scientific endeavor by establishing protections for the theoretical life and the free use of reason. This was a daunting and necessary challenge, since enlightenment required the refutation of the religious superstitions and falsehoods that invested institutional power and public opinion in order to replace them with rational explanations of the world. Enlightenment philosophers did so by convincing the European aristocracy that the advance of science would necessarily entail more effective and beneficial political organization, since that organization was to be based, for the first time in history, on reason. Reason established the philosophical grounds of liberal democracy, and the university, as an institution specializing in the free exercise of reason, has an organic and special relationship with liberal society. Bloom observes that “[t]he free university exists only in liberal democracy, and liberal democracies exist only where there are free universities” (259).

This privileged relation with democracy involves certain obligations and functions for the university that are unnecessary or impossible in other political regimes, such as aristocracy or totalitarianism. Citing Tocqueville, Bloom argues that the university must serve a corrective role in liberal societies, countering the deficiencies and intellectual blindness specific to a democratic, egalitarian regime. These deficiencies include the tyrannical influence of public opinion and the disregard for tradition and anything without obvious utilitarian value. Moreover, democracy suppresses the awareness of the viability and legitimacy of alternative forms of political organization; since reason is universal and liberal democracy is the form of government established by reason, there can be only one valid political solution. Liberal democracy’s success since the Enlightenment has resulted in a self-satisfaction and self-referentiality that constrict the full spectrum of thought available to the human spirit.

Against the distorting and leveling effects of democratic society, the university must preserve intellectual alternatives and the disinterested use of reason as intrinsic goods, thereby securing the freedom of the mind. Against the democratic focus on the present and the transitory, it must emphasize the value of tradition and the eternal; it must counter the commonplace and vulgar by stressing the heroic and noble. Perhaps most importantly, Bloom argues, “the function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself, by being the model of true openness” (253). The danger he alludes to is that reason, paradoxically, tends to become a prejudice in liberal society, resisting modes of thought other than those sanctioned by egalitarian ideology and institutions.

The threat to the American university posed by its embrace of relativism was prefigured in Germany, Bloom opines. The nineteenth-century German university became the model for American universities and was at the forefront of the advance of the natural and human sciences until the rise of Nazism. Under the influence of Rousseau and Kant, the German university divided the domains of the human and natural sciences according to the conceptual prerogatives and type of causality appropriate to each sphere. This categorizing enabled both divisions of knowledge, the “hard” sciences of matter and the “soft” sciences of man, to thrive. In the humanities, historicism became the primary organizing principle, while deterministic and materialistic explanations were freed to operate in the natural sciences without theological or philosophical interference. The rise of historicism and the theory of evolution, however, weakened the claims of reason to universality, since the mind was increasingly recognized as the product of historical development. This weakening undermined philosophy’s ability to discover stable truths, including moral truths, and to establish the supremacy of reason. Philosophical pessimism and a crisis in values were the results. A sad legacy of Nietzsche’s relativism, exemplified in Heidegger’s submission to the Nazi regime, was the capitulation of the university to the cultural passions that surrounded and assailed it.

Bloom argues that the same crisis of values led to the failure of American universities to resist similar passions—from the Left this time—in the 1960s. The seeming anarchy of disciplines that undergraduate students find on entering the university today, moreover, reflects its institutional inability to articulate a coherent and noble vision of liberal arts education that is grounded in a set of unifying philosophical principles. Students are demoralized, unguided by their teachers as to what a truly educated person is or what constitutes good as opposed to bad in religion, philosophy, or art (337). To fulfill its mission today, the American university must re-emphasize the humanities as a collection of disciplines interrogating and teaching values, Bloom insists. He argues that revitalizing the Great Books curriculum of classic texts is the most effective way to do this, as well as the best means of inspiring students with intellectual passion. Reading the foundational texts on their own terms enables students to have experiences and seriously engage with ideas they otherwise would not be able to do in our democracy, which is the fundamental pedagogical role of the university, in Bloom’s view.

A central concept of political liberalism and the democratic university is freedom of thought. Bloom addresses the idea from multiple perspectives in the book—its origin in Enlightenment rationalism, its historical development within philosophy and society, its shifting fortunes within the modern university, and its relation to the crisis of relativism. Bloom defends the classical definition of the concept from the attacks and perversions it has suffered at the hands of fanaticism, irrationalism, judicial activism, and the pervasive ignorance characterizing American culture today.

Freedom of thought, he asserts, was proposed by Enlightenment thinkers to protect the free and disinterested use of reason against political and religious suppression. They successfully argued that freedom of thought underpinned the other political freedoms and natural rights that were the fruits of reason and would result in the beneficial reformation of society. Bloom traces the germ of the idea to Socrates, the supreme exemplar of the theoretical life who devoted himself to the rational pursuit of self-knowledge and was executed by Athens for impiety and corrupting its youth. The Enlightenment project of theoretical inquiry is Socratic in spirit and was institutionalized in the modern university, whose guiding principle is preserving the sanctity of freedom of thought. In a democratic regime, Bloom argues, this principle extends to preventing reason itself from becoming a prejudice and thereby foreclosing the liberty of the intellect.

In America, the original concept of freedom of thought was broadened to freedom of expression, a democratization of the idea that ushered in troubling new paradoxes. Bloom argues that the intention of the Founders was to protect and enable reasoned discourse; they were not particularly interested in safeguarding irrational or fanatical perspectives but hoped to prevent a single position from becoming dominant in the public sphere. We have lost sight of that original intent, Bloom claims; for many, freedom of expression means the protection of eccentric, outlandish, or vulgar speech (or gesture) regardless of its destructive effect on norms or civility. This view is exactly opposite of the Founders’ aims, Bloom suggests.

Freedom of thought is stifled by dogmatism and doctrinaire opinion, which are always a threat in egalitarian societies in which the majority exerts undue influence on public discourse. We assume we live in a free marketplace of ideas, but our alternatives are policed and limited by many versions of political correctness that have played an exclusionary role vis-à-vis thought and expression in recent history. Preserving the alternatives is a basic function of the university, necessary to secure fundamental intellectual and political freedoms, Bloom argues. The activism of the 1960s and the ensuing efforts to reform the university in the interest of greater “openness” and relaxed standards have crippled its ability to provide meaningful alternatives for students’ contemplation. Bloom criticizes the rigid dogmatism he saw infecting university campuses since the 1960s, in which indignation and anger replaced reason as a guide.