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Allan Bloom - In Memoriam

Ellis Washington - 6/15/2011

Part 1

We can’t avoid thinking. The thoughtless are always going to be the prisoners of other people’s thoughts. American intellectual life has given us an easy way to believe anything we want.
~ Allan Bloom (Time Magazine interview, Oct.1988)

Prologue

I am kindred spirits with Allan Bloom, a great American philosopher, historian, academic and classicist. My worn copy of Bloom’s magnum opus The Closing of the American Mind has the inscription: “Border’s Books, Sept. 7, 1988”— literally days after I arrived at Harvard as a grad student during the same time as Barack Obama arrived there already indoctrinated by Marx, Che Guevara, Alinsky, J.M. Keynes, Cloward-Piven, Laurence Tribe, Noam Chomsky and many other leftist radicals, the latter who dismissed Bloom’s book as "mind-bogglingly stupid" for its canonistic approach to education and Benjamin Barber of Rutgers writing, “one of the most profoundly antidemocratic books ever written for a popular audience.”

Bloom’s book draws comparisons between the United States and the Weimar Republic and traces contemporary liberalism philosophy back to the Age of Enlightenment (1650-1800) and the ideas and writings of Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, together with the rise of relativism in American thought—had caused this collective societal descent into darkness.

For Bloom, the moral vacuum created by liberalism inside the souls of Americans was filled by demagogic radicals in the '60s similar to the Nazi Brownshirts who in the ‘20s and 30s filled the breach created in German society by the Weimar Republic. Bloom further argued that liberal values of philosophy and reason understood as freedom of thought, had been hijacked by a pseudo-philosophy, or an ideology of thought. In other words, Bloom’s critique against relativism was the primary aspect of modern liberal philosophy identified as having sabotaged the Socratic–Platonic worldview, logic and teachings.

Bloom inside the Pagan arena

In his introduction Bloom traced the development of liberalism from the Age of Enlightenment and French Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries, to Social Darwinism, Marxist collectivism and Nietzsche’s nihilism of the 19th century, the latter which was fanatically embraced by many influential scientists, academics and progressive intellectuals like Oliver Wendell Holmes who in the 1870s used a Darwinian worldview to undermine natural law and a Judeo-Christian worldview as the intellectual foundation of American jurisprudence.

Bloom wrote:

The gradual movement away from [natural] rights to [sophistic] openness was apparent, for example, when Oliver Wendell Holmes renounced seeking for a principle to determine which speech or conduct is not tolerable in a democratic society and invoked instead an imprecise and practically meaningless standard—clear and present danger—which to all intents and purposes makes the preservation of public order the only common good.

Holmes, who by his influential station in society as a well-respected author, legal scholar, intellectual, Harvard professor and Supreme Court Justice, was the key figure between 1870-1930 who helped transform American culture away from reliance on the Founders who believed in transcendent principles, to the vague world of randomness, meaninglessness and evolving standards of Darwinian evolution as the basis of all American laws; a radical progressive worldview that eventually came to dominate the academy (particularly law schools) including politics, economics, education, business, medicine, science, society and culture, all the way through FDR’s “New Deal” of the 1930s to this day.

Bloom continues:

Behind [Holmes] opinion there was an optimistic view about progress, one in which the complete decay of democratic principle and a collapse into barbarism are impossible and in which the truth unaided always triumphs in the marketplace of ideas. This optimism had not been shared by the Founders, who insisted that the principles of democratic government must be returned to and consulted even though the consequences might be harsh for certain points of view …. What began in Charles Beards’ Marxism and Carl Becker’s historicism became routine. We are used to hearing the Founders charged with being racists, murderers of Indians, representatives of class interests…

Here Bloom attacks Holmes’ optimism as derivative of materialism and historical revisionism which ran counter to 5,000 years of Judeo-Christian tradition who the Founders deliberately embraced. Bloom also attacked Holmes’ relativism and anti-intellectualism as sophism which removed God from the center of society and replaced deity with egalitarianism which put all ideologies, policies and philosophies on an equal footing in what Holmes frequently referred to as the “marketplace of ideas.”

The influence of Holmes on the law, courts and society is universal. For example, academics like Carl Becker's historicism/relativism and Charles Beard, whose Marxist zeitgeist and materialistic model of class conflict acknowledged Holmes' social Darwinist ideas. Together these men influenced generations of American academics and historians like Richard Hofstadter, psychologists and educators like John Dewey, scientists, intellectuals, judges (Richard Posner, Ginsburg, Breyer), law professors (L. Tribe, C. Sunstein), politicians (Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Obama) and virtually all of today's leftist pressure groups, as they are in numerous ways indebted to the ideas of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

On what is now referred to as identity politics, Bloom argued that “the latest enemy of the vitality of classic texts is feminism. In this view, all literature of today is deemed to be sexist.” On affirmative action Bloom wrote that it created “this little black empire” and perpetuated something of an institutional fraud in the form of “permanent quotas, financial preference, racial hiring of faculty and difficulty in giving blacks failing marks.”

Epilogue

In The Closing of the American Mind Bloom taught us many important things; too many to cover here, but most significantly he thought us that Hobbes, Rousseau, Darwin, Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Lenin, Hitler, Freud, Holmes were all brilliant philosophers, but historically their ideas could only condemn mankind to the abyss, they did not and could never redeem humanity.

On the crucial importance of the academy teaching students the classics, Bloom said, “My passion comes out of the sense of what’s important and the freedom that comes through studying [the classics] and the concern for young persons who are being deprived of all standards outside themselves.” Hearkening back to Aristotle’s first principles outlined in Metaphysics, Bloom gave a singular statement on the objective of good education: “The golden thread of all education is in the first questions: How should I live? What’s the good life? What can I hope for? What must I do? What would be the terrible consequences if we knew the truth?”

In our present Age of Obama, that last question is both prophetic and painful which leads me to wonder if Professor Bloom were alive today to witness our present collapse into intellectual depravity, economic anarchy and societal nihilism, what would he say? Perhaps Bloom would ask this one question—America, why did you allow communists, socialists and progressives to close your mind to the precious and transcendent gifts of Western Civilization?

Part 2

The world is a dangerous place to live not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

~ Albert Einstein

Einstein’s aphorism above in an utterly singular manner extrapolates why Professor Allan Bloom had to write his magnum opus, The Closing of the American Mind, at the critical time in history which he did. Bloom exposed the tragedy that the social/political crisis of 20th century America was in reality an intellectual crisis in large part caused by the contemporary university failing its students. Bloom’s original prophecy has since metastasized into a universal crisis of morality approaching biblical proportions.

If Lenin boasted, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted,” then the 100 years the academy has incessantly labored to deconstruct the canon of Western civilization and replace it with a existential progressive revolution, a Marxist zeitgeist, Social Darwinism, Nietzchean nihilism and relativism — from the 1880s to the publication of his book in 1987— makes Professor Bloom a truly heroic figure of Homeric proportions for even attempting to uproot the evil seeds that this diabolical trinity had planted in American intellectual life and worldwide.

In other words, Bloom was essentially a missionary or prophet to the academy who like the Jewish prophets of antiquity, exposed and condemned their apostasy when they first uncritically accepted by faith, codified, then deified Marx, Darwin and Nietzsche as the new Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.

The academy responded with predictable revulsion and ridicule. Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University called Bloom’s book “one of the most profoundly antidemocratic books ever written for a popular audience.” Another Luddite accused Bloom of being the leader of a “new cult of educational fundamentalism.” Martha Nussbaum, Bloom’s own University of Chicago colleague in the Philosophy Department, had the brazen temerity to write, "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan Bloom? The answer is, we cannot say, and we are given no reason to think him one at all." (I sent my initial essay on Bloom to the entire Philosophy faculty at the University of Chicago without a single reply to date).

My initial essay in memory of Professor Allan Bloom received 43 negative entries on a secular humanist blog which prompted me to write my own apology (No. 44):

Exceeding gratitude to my antagonist, Mr. Ed Brayton, for posting another work of mine on his popular and interesting website, however, with the exception of No.18, most of the comments fell prey to Bloom's erudite and irrefutable syllogism which I placed at the beginning of my article ironically to avoid the very intellectual paradox I am now forced to contend with, particularly the B clause…:

We can't avoid thinking. The thoughtless are always going to be the prisoners of other people's thoughts. American intellectual life has given us an easy way to believe anything we want.

As a Christian conservative and academic, my tribute essay to Professor Allan Bloom was meant to accomplish two simple objectives: (1) To enlighten the reader on how truly transcendent ideas can affect people in such profound ways as to change their behavior, thinking and even their worldview. On this point, Bloom's book completed my transition from Democratic socialist to conservatism by Oct. 1988 while in the midst of liberal Mecca— Harvard University; (2) To present a trenchant apologetic to America that despite the contradictions, inadequacies and hypocrisies of the messenger [here Bloom] that Veritas is truth, truth is transcendent and metaphysical, thus, God is truth.

I'm currently reading an excellent biography by Eric Metaxas on Dietrich Bonheoffer, the courageous German pastor savagely murdered in a Nazi concentration camp just weeks before the end of World War II wrote, "In Jesus Christ the reality of God has entered into the reality of this world... All concepts of reality that ignore Jesus Christ are abstractions."

Although published almost 20 years ago Keith Botsford’s sublime obituary for Allan Bloom in the UK Independent still rings with a clarion integrity: “Bloom was writing vigorous polemic at a time when America sought to ensure that the intellect could not (and would not be allowed) to rise above gender and race; the mind was to be defined by its melanin and genetic content, and by what lay between our legs; or, in the academe, the canon was to be re-read and re-defined so that it fitted the latest theorem of gender or race. Bloom would have none of it. … Well, that's their loss; as he is ours.”

Indeed Mr. Botsford, it is their loss to read, listen, observe or experience all of the glorious works of Western civilization—from Homer to Hobbes to Heidegger, from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, from Galileo to Goethe to Gibbons, from Caesar, Christ, Constantine, Charlemagne to Kant, Carlyle and Churchill— through the narrow-minded and irrelevant lens of race, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, sexual orientation, or some other nitwit liberal abstraction. Bloom took the shackles from my mind and helped me escape from that oppressive slave plantation of what Norman Podhoretz called “intolerant dogmatism” and anti-intellectualism to Bloom’s world where the classics provided in his words “this kind of greatness inspiring one to human perfection [as] the central perspective of education.”

Professor Bloom’s revelatory opus, “The Closing of the American Mind,” was not a Neville Chamberlain appeasement treaty for peace with a Hitler, but a Churchillian declaration of war against Hitler which deconstructed Jonah Goldberg called “liberal fascism,” Democratic socialism, Rousseauean radicalism and buried the Marxist mob slogan: The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism. Bloom’s book wretched America out of its indolence, arrogance, ignorance and Groupthink so that whosoever will—even a little black boy like me from the ghettos of Detroit —could find intellectual redemption by reading from the canon of transcendent books which made the mind of Professor Allan David Bloom… bloom like a fragrant garden of roses.